Surveillance Tech and the Fight for Immigrant Justice

For this year's Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture, join Mizue Aizeki (Executive Director, Collaborative Research Center for Resilience), and Make the Road New York’s Luba Cortés (Civil Rights and Immigration Lead Organizer) and Natalia  Aristizábal (Co-Executive Director) for a public conversation on surveillance technology, AI, and immigrant justice. Moderated by Miriam Ticktin, the discussion will examine how automated surveillance systems, predictive technologies, and data-driven policing are transforming border and immigration enforcement as well as immigrant justice organizing in New York City.

As federal investment in AI, surveillance infrastructure, and military technologies continues to expand, immigration enforcement has become a critical testing ground for technologies that enable mass deportation and inaugurate new forms of policing. Drawing on Make the Road New York's decades of expertise in immigration organizing and policy, alongside Surveillance Resistance Lab's recent research on partnerships between federal immigration agencies and technology companies, the conversation will examine the ongoing threats to the rights and dignity of immigrant communities. It will also foreground strategies of community resistance and collective protection that have emerged in response.

The program will also include a Know Your Rights training focused on surveillance technologies.

Accessibility: This event is free and open to the public. ASL interpretation will be provided. Registration is required. A light reception will follow the conversation.

Image Credit: Trismegist san/Shutterstock

Mizue Aizeki is the founder and Executive Director of the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience (CRCR), which conducts investigative and community-centered research. The CRCR focuses on understanding the ways in which power flows through digital infrastructures, with the aim of fostering collective knowledge and practices towards expanding democracy. The CRCR is home to projects such as the Surveillance Resistance Lab, The Everywhere Border and Reimagining Security. For over twenty years, Mizue has focused on the injustices at the intersection of the criminal and migration control systems, including leading multiple successful policy campaigns in New York City and New York State. She has co-authored multiple reports and papers including Prediction and Punishment: The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement, and the Threat to Democracy (June 2026), Digital Migration Control Infrastructure as Worldmaking (Dec 2023), Critical Report on Carceral AI (January 2025), Smart-City Digital ID Projects (December 2021), Smart Borders or a Humane World (TNI, October 2021), HART Attack: How DHS’s Massive Biometrics Database Will Supercharge Surveillance and Threaten Rights (May 2022), and Who’s Behind ICE: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations (2018). Mizue is a co-editor of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, February 2024). Her work has been published in Scholar and Feminist Online and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016). Her photography appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008).

Natalia  Aristizábal is Co-Executive Director at Make the Road New York, the largest grassroots immigrant-led organization in New York. She leads MRNY’s organizing and communications departments. She immigrated to New York from Colombia at age 12, joining Make the Road as a youth member and eventually coming on staff as an organizer. She later moved up to be organizing director. Along the way, she coordinated the organization’s youth and arts programming in Queens, worked alongside young people and TGNCIQ (Transgender, Gender Non-Conforming, Intersex, and Queer) community members, and led MRNY’s organizing on Long Island. She also worked with other immigrant youth from across the US to create United We Dream in 2008. From 2019 to 2022 she served as Director for Immigrant Justice at Popular Democracy. Over her 20+ year organizing career, Natalia has been instrumental in many large-scale organizing victories, such as the fight for the futures of undocumented youth, which culminated in the creation of DACA. She is a board member of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) and a co-chair of the Home is Here Coalition. She recently served on Mayor Mamdani’s transition committee on immigration policy.

Miriam Ticktin is Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP) and Professor of Anthropology and Black, Race and Ethnic Studies at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center. She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and most recently, she has written about the idea of decolonial feminist commoning. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (2012); co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (2010); and her latest book is Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (2025). She is currently working on her next book, Containment and Commoning: From Bordered Worlds to Collective Life. Ticktin writes in public venues such as Truthout, LARB and Open Democracy, and organizes with migrant social justice groups in the US and in France.

Luba Cortés (She/They) is an advocate and cultural organizer, who believes that our lived experiences serve as the catalyst for change. With over a decade of organizing experience, Luba’s expertise lies in building leadership through immigrant and queer narratives. Their work centers on understanding the complexities of identity, and navigating political landscapes for national and local advocacy. Throughout her career, she has spearheaded successful campaigns to disrupt the harm that enforcement has caused undocumented communities, and has developed vital curricula to educate and galvanize community members around a range of social issues. Luba is an ICLP Coro fellow, and has served on different advisory boards including the Envision Freedom Fund (Formerly Brooklyn Community Bail Fund) and the Brooklyn Foundation. Luba is a sought-after expert, and is often quoted by major media outlets on immigration-related topics. Luba currently serves as the Civil Rights and Immigration Lead Organizer at Make the Road New York, overseeing the organization's immigration portfolio and continuing to champion immigrant rights and justice.