An exhibit of photos and information on border surveillance technology will open Wednesday at Angel Island State Park, which organizers say is the first of its kind at a California State Park and a National Historic Landmark.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation will host the project through late May in cooperation with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and California State Parks.
The exhibit explores the “virtual wall” that organizers say the U.S. government has built along the U.S.-Mexico border, affecting people’s civil rights on both sides.
“There are few better places than Angel Island, where U.S. policy enabled the persecution of thousands of Asian immigrants, for an exhibition on the tools used today to conduct warrantless spying on people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border,” said EFF Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia, in a statement.
“We hope that as people visit Angel Island to reflect upon America’s immigration policies of the past, this exhibit will help them reflect on how we deal with our borders — and the people who live and travel there — now and in the future.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said that for years it amassed data and images about the massive increase in surveillance technology infrastructure at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Staff members made a series of trips along the border, from the California coast to the tip of Texas, to learn from communities on both sides; interview journalists, workers and activists; and map and document the technology installed there.
The exhibit features eight large panels of images and text describing various technologies, including aerostats, drones, fixed and mobile cameras, ground sensors, and more.
Some panels discuss the history of border surveillance and where the technology could be going, including augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
The U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, is a National Historic Landmark located within Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay. From 1910 to 1940, the station processed nearly a million immigrants from more than 80 countries.
The foundation said that while the station was often called “the Ellis Island of the West,” Angel Island was quite different. Arrivals at Ellis Island were welcomed by the Statue of Liberty, screened primarily for medical reasons, and usually released within hours of arriving.
At Angel Island, the foundation said the objective was to exclude many new arrivals, often under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Health inspectors examine detainees on Angel Island in 1917. (National Archives via Bay City News)
Most of the 175,000 Chinese immigrants who arrived at Angel Island were detained for a few weeks — some were detained up to 90 days and a few for almost two years — while their applications were considered, according to the foundation. Many detainees expressed their anxiety and despair by writing and carving on the wooden barracks walls; some wrote poignant poems, still legible today.
“The historic detention of immigrants at Angel Island is interconnected with surveillance efforts along the U.S. southern border,” said AIISF Executive Director Edward Tepporn, in the statement. “Just as Angel Island was built primarily to process and detain Asians and Pacific Islanders, early border surveillance efforts focused on Chinese immigrants. Surveillance technology has evolved over the years, and this exhibit provides visitors a chance to contemplate the intersections of safety and privacy at the personal, community, and national levels.”