Hello World!

We began our project with the belief that digital archives could serve as tools of empowerment and visibility for marginalized communities, an idea gaining momentum among academics and activists disillusioned by a mainstream media that doesn’t serve the interests of those they claim to represent, especially those most marginalized. Our goal was to create an anonymized digital archive focused on Haitian migrants’ self-representation through TikTok: an archive not of us speaking for them or filming them, but of migrants using their own voices and videos to describe their own experiences. We wanted to dismantle the reductive, racialized caricatures of “The Haitian Migrant” and instead present the complex, nuanced realities of Haitian migration into the United States.

Why We Couldn’t Create This Archive

Recent policy changes in the US have made our original vision impossible: 

• Border Policy Changes: As of May 2025, crossing rates at the border have decreased 94% since the Trump administration took power. According to US Customs and Border Patrol, zero people were released into US territory. Haitian refugees and migrants have been stuck in Mexico, creating geographic barriers to our research. 
• Increased Risk for Non-Citizens: The border search exception to the Fourth Amendment has compromised academic freedom, especially for international student researchers on our team. This exception:
  • Applies to citizens and non-citizens alike
  • Allows authorities to confiscate belongings and make arrests of anyone
  • Permits authorities to remove or turn away non-citizens at the border
• Partner Organization Constraints: Our collaboration with Haitian Bridge Alliance stalled since they needed to rightfully prioritize legal counseling and mental health support for those vulnerable to the possible revocation of TPS and other legal protections.
• Community Trust Concerns: Communication with members of the Haitian community has become increasingly difficult as current political circumstances foster distrust and paranoia.

From the beginning, we knew that digital archives exist in two forms: while they can offer visibility, representation, and resistance, they can also be used as tools in hyper surveilled states as a mechanism of control; currently,  to harm, and to disappear people. We anticipated that through our methodology which included anonymization, considerations about safety, an IRB approval, and our refusal to use a TikTok API key (since the company’s condition was to then provide all of our data and research directly to TikTok), the benefits could outweigh the harms. We were wrong. 

Our initial plan was to collaborate with an NGO at the Reynosa–McAllen crossing. This quickly became infeasible. Tightened border enforcement caused a simultaneous rise in cartel control and militarized Border Patrol presence, making any research unsafe for both us and the people we hoped to work with. Our pivot to the Tijuana-San Diego crossing also failed – one of our team members is a citizen of a country targeted by the 2025 Travel Ban, making travel logistically and legally dangerous. In addition to the vagueness of the consequences of the Travel Ban, ICE raids especially where our fieldwork was meant to happen was unsafe.

Furthermore, the Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA), an NGO we continue to work with, confirmed that rates of crossing have drastically decreased in the last few months. They, rightly, needed to focus their resources on providing legal counseling and mental health services for those most impacted in their community rather than research. That is why we decided to pivot our efforts to supporting their current projects, as opposed to executing our initial storytelling workshop. In February 2025, one of our team members traveled to Atlanta to meet with the HBA’s humanitarian director. This conference took place in a church in Georgia, offering legal, physical health, and mental health resources to the local Haitian community. Even a seminar on gardening as a space for healing, in a church, surrounded by community, focusing on mental health therapy, the anxieties caused by the uncertainty of TPS status dominated the space.

The heart of our proposed archive was the idea that TikTok offers a platform for self-narration and visibility, one that could counter the reductive, often racist, portrayals dominant in humanitarian and media discourses. This hope collapsed under the weight of federal policy. The scheduled termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian migrants in September of 2025, the earlier attempts to do so and bypass courts’ decisions, and the aggressive immigration enforcement tactics increasingly targeting Haitian communities have heightened the risks to the point of representational empowerment no longer being comparative in value. 

The Ethical Dilemma of Digital Archives in a Surveillance State

These policy shifts have forced many Haitian migrants to reroute their journeys, with evermore people remaining in Mexico. Given the increased restrictions on researcher mobility for our team and heightened risks faced by non-US citizens within border zones (defined as areas within 100 miles of the Mexico-US border), conducting research in these areas on immigration and immigrants has become practically impossible. 

The “border search exception” to the Fourth Amendment further complicates this, permitting authorities to confiscate belongings, detain, or even deny entry to non-citizens. This meant that our research team, if we took any kind of electronics for documentation, could be forced to then provide access to our devices to Customs and Border Patrol, requiring either that we completely anonymize data and footage before traveling, that we upload everything to the Cloud and wipe our devices, or that we conduct all research away from Stanford (given the enforcement zone extends as far as Sacramento). This environment severely compromises both the safety of potential research participants and the academic freedom required for conducting ethical and responsible research. 

This is not research. It is surrendering under threat. It is surveillance disguised as scholarship. It is a pretense of freedom in a carceral, punitive regime. Under these conditions, we cannot in good conscience create a digital archive that may one day be weaponized against the very people we seek to support, with the new pressures of subpoenas and the possible threat of turning over our data. To continue with this archive would not be radical or empowering. It would be reckless. 

Refusal as a Form of Resistance

And yet, these stories still matter. They always will. Despite these significant ethical and practical barriers, the importance of documenting Haitian migrants’ experiences remains. Perhaps the refusal to archive is itself a form of resistance in an era where data extraction is synonymous with control, where easy access to TikTok data means providing them the extraction through our labor. Instead of feeding the surveillance state machine, we ask: what other forms of memory-making are possible? What kinds of archives should exist when AI-enhanced surveillance empowers oppressors more than the oppressed? 

We created a framework to investigate this question. Check our Taking Power Back: Media Literacy Manifesto

Conclusion

Although the original intent behind the archive was to amplify migrant voices and counter harmful stereotypes, the contemporary political and technological state of the United States especially, but the world more broadly, necessitates a reimagining of how we create and maintain archives. In addition, it begs to question the extent to which digital life may be or should be the new norm in archival practices. 

While the digital era assumes to be best for its promise to wide accessibility worldwide, if the digital world is also the tool that facilitates the centralization of surveillance mechanisms, it might be worth exploring the act of refusal through inoperation as a necessary strategy for participants’ and communities’ safety.  

At the same time, we recognize that storytelling is a tool of empowerment and resistance, not only because of what you get out of it: taking control over truth-building, but also because of its potential in building community, which is a long-term process. In this spirit, we continue to support the work of the Haitian Bridge Alliance and other grassroots organizations with deep roots within the communities they serve, and might benefit from a storytelling framework like the one we developed, influenced by those who critically think about storytelling and justice.