To explore further how racism against people of color gets coded in AI tools of surveillance, we propose this panel with four presentations, each spanning around 12 minutes, ensuring enough time for unstructured discussion.

The first paper by Muhammad Waqar Azeem expands on the above theoretical context to critical AI and its applications in perpetuating racism against people of color in the US. The second speaker, Lopamudra Basu prese argues that Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel portrays a futuristic society which is using predictive AI to profile potential criminals to make interventions even before any actual crimes have been committed. The protagonist Sara finds herself flagged at the airport and removed to a retention center. What follows is an endless ordeal trying to prove her innocence and escape the carceral bureaucracy that she is enmeshed in. Lalami, whose previous novels have captured the post 9/11 racialization of Muslims, now depicts a society where the logic of profiling has been stretched to the extreme placing all ethnic minorities and women not only within the panopticon gaze of the state and its carceral logic that disrupts normal life. The novel parallels real life developments of Immigration enforcement in the U.S, which has captured many brown immigrants and forced them into detention centers without any actual charges being pressed. AI is thus already facilitating the surveillance state and making minorities “conditional citizens.” Suarjan Prasai, the third speaker, examines the intersection of artificial intelligence, biopolitics, and the historical legacy of eugenics in contemporary U.S. immigration surveillance with a focus on South Asian communities. Drawing on Troy Duster’s foundational work on the social consequences of genetics and racial classification, Suarjan situates contemporary immigration technologies within longer histories of racialized population management (Duster). The analysis also engages Anita Say Chan’s Predatory Data, which traces how modern big-data infrastructures inherit classificatory methods developed by early twentieth-century eugenicists to justify immigration restriction and racial hierarchy (Chan). By combining classic critical AI scholarship, including Wendy Chun’s Discriminating Data (2021) and Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology (2019), with historical and cultural analysis, this presentation conceptualizes immigration AI as a form of automated biopolitical surveillance. It demonstrates how ostensibly neutral technologies reproduce historical racial hierarchies in migration control, while also highlighting the potential for critical, culturally informed interventions to challenge these automated systems. The last speaker A B M Shafiqul Islam examines how AI-driven surveillance technologies shape the mobility and everyday experiences of Global South citizens, particularly members of the South Asian diaspora who are living, studying, and working in the United States. A B M Shafiqul Islam further argues that after 9/11 the United States expanded many digital security technologies which include biometric tools, facial recognition systems, predictive risk scores, and social media screening. These technologies now influence important processes such as visa applications, airport security, and border control. Although these systems appear neutral, they use large datasets that often contain political assumptions about which regions or groups are “risky.” Because of this, many travelers and migrants from the Global South experience more strict checks and slower movement through borders. By shifting the discussion from the rhetoric of democratizing AI to the critical framework of decolonizing AI, the paper argues that examining these technologies through diaspora experiences exposes the racialized and geopolitical logics at work within contemporary surveillance regimes.