Technologies of Removal: Drones, Deportation, and Pipelines

• In Event: Sight and the Spoils of Empire

Abstract

In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act consolidated and replaced the words “exclusion” and “deportation” with “removal,” making explicit what Daniel Kanstroom argues had been in practice since the early years of the republic—that the laws directed at deporting immigrants had been shaped by earlier policies of Indian removal. As current news cycle show, pipelines continue to be built over indigenous lands and ICE raids are intensifying. But, the apparatuses of indigenous colonization and immigrant exclusion—if they are acknowledged at all--remain visible only as concurrent and parallel lines that never meet.

This paper considers the continuities and geometries of Indian removal and immigrant deportation through the lens of drone technology. The use of drones in wars, border control, and real estate development has led to the formation of what Ian R. Shaw calls a “predatory empire,” in which the reliance on labor to uphold empire has shifted to a reliance on machines. The power and value of drones hinge on their mobility and visual superiority: their ability to see their targets but remain invisible; their putative precision in “bloodless” wars; and their efficiency in real estate marketing and the production and domestic spaces.

The use of drones for warfare, border control, and property development underscores settler sovereignty’s reliance on visuality to protect and secure white property through a constant state of emergency. Through examining images taken by drones in the militarized zones of the border and of the protests against the North Dakota Access Pipeline, I explore how this mode of surveillance visually produces its object of removal as security threats. I conclude with an examination into the emergent forms of resistance reflected in the drone footage taken by the water protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to make visible the intersections of deportation and removal under settler colonialism.

Author

• Marie Lo, Portland State University