Technologies of containment: redistributing security through the U.S. driver’s license

This article interrogates how the U.S. driver's license achieved its central status in the governance and criminalization of non-citizens. It identifies the means through which it was used to construct a dichotomy between verifiable citizens and unverifiable non-citizens by tracing the license's historical development. Such a historical approach, in combination with ethnographic engagement, allows for an analysis that does not treat the REAL ID as merely a novel border technology, but as an extension of an older technology of racial containment centered around the photographic portrait. The article examines the two-decade-long implementation of the REAL ID, and its function as a technology of containment targeting non-citizens-especially those without status. It draws on archival and ethnographic research on driver's license discourse, attitudes, and laws in Massachusetts, including a campaign seeking to expand eligibility to all drivers regardless of status. The article advances a two-part argument. First, the post-9/11 call for interoperable identification systems formally extended the role of the driver's license from an infrastructure largely used to regulate the mobility of Black citizens into one meant to detect, immobilize, and deter non-citizens. Second, the implementation of this identity infrastructure, which was expected to ensure the smooth circulation of information (Chaar-López, I., 2019. Sensing intruders: race and the automation of border control. American quarterly, 71 (2), 495-518) contributed to the production of conditions of viscous mobility for illegalized non-citizens. Under conditions of viscous mobility, illegalized residents do not fully lose their right to mobility, but experience mobility as highly contained and risk-laden; circulating increases the potential opportunities to be ID'd, detained, and deported. Viscous mobility is produced through state and law enforcement agencies' advancement of centralized identity technologies and interoperable databases, cooperative agreements between police and immigration enforcement agencies, multi-sited enforcement patterns, and bureaucratic delay.