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 The 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).

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.

Natalia Aristizabal  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.