What does it mean to practice empathy in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence? That was the urgent question posed by Professor Donovan in his recent talk, “Accompaniment or Alienation? The Promise and Peril of AI for Communities in Migration” at Fordham’s International Conference on Im/migration, AI and Social Justice.
Gregory T. Donovan, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Communication & Media Studies and Urban Studies/New Media & Digital Design Departments at Fordham University.
Professor Donovan began to research the relationship between accompaniment, migration, and artificial intelligence as a part of Fordham’s Initiative on Migrants, Migration and Human Dignity two years ago. His research included participation in immigration studies programs, field work at the US-Mexico border, and engagement with New York City practitioners through graduate courses and formal interviews.
What Is Accompaniment?
Donovan defines accompaniment as “bearing witness, being with, and sharing journeys.” It moves beyond service or charity and toward long-term, relational solidarity rooted in human dignity.
He also defined migration as an everyday practice rather than a crisis, focusing on approximately 14 million people with undocumented or weak documentation status in the United States as of 2023.
Connecting both terms, accompaniment in migration justice means recognizing migrants’ humanity, supporting their agency, and resisting systems that reduce people to numbers or categories. But the stakes get higher as artificial intelligence plays a growing role in shaping those systems.
The Stakes of Technology and Power
Most migrants crossing the border have smartphones or can at least get access to one. Although technology may not seem like a tool of survival, being able to call border patrol or an emergency line, let a loved one know they are alive, or have access to a translation app, becomes essential in situations of life or death.
As technology becomes more crucial in providing support or aid in humanitarian crises, so does artificial intelligence. AI tools like translation apps or legal aid chatbots have offered free practical support to migrants as they cross the border and seek asylum.
However, Donovan warned that the power behind these technologies remains concentrated in the hands of tech corporations and government agencies. Companies like Amazon and contractors like Palantir are using AI to support surveillance, policing, and border militarization, all under the guise of “innovation.”
A powerful example Donovan shared was the 2012 killing of José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, a 16-year-old boy shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Nogales, Mexico. The agent claimed Rodríguez was throwing rocks over the fence, justifying the fatal shooting. A surveillance tower behind the wall recorded the entire incident, yet when the case went to court, the original video footage had disappeared.
The only existing copy, obtained by Rodríguez’s lawyers, was dismissed as inadmissible because it wasn’t sourced from the original hardware. This, Donovan explained, shows how even advanced technology meant to offer “transparency” can be controlled, concealed, or manipulated by those in power. “If the power is not being redistributed,” he noted, “then these tools are doing very little in terms of accompaniment.”
“There is no AI that exists solely in a humanitarian context without generating revenue,” Donovan explained. Even when applied to legal support, employment, or language translation for migrants, AI is frequently built to collect data and extract value, data that is being used to support billion-dollar companies and their owners. This data only helps these A.I companies to expand, while harming the planet and expanding the wealth gap, which ultimately harms disadvantaged populations like migrants, leaving us with a larger ethical question:
How do we use A.I., which can be a helpful tool in accompaniment and supporting migrants, without being responsible for the larger, ethical implications?
Reframing Migration and Hospitality
In a capitalist system, we are often trained to think about profit as the net outcome of every industry. But when discussing policies and actions that can affect millions of lives, such as the fate of migrants and the methods of approaching migration, a profit-driven mentality does not work. The only way to create a just world is to challenge our ways of thinking.
Donovan challenged listeners to imagine hospitality not as a commercial industry, but as an act of valuing people in their full humanity.
“We often talk about migrants as the lifeblood of the hospitality industry,” he noted. “But what would it mean to offer hospitality to migrants in a non-commercialized way?”
Designing for Mutuality, Not Extraction
To address these questions, Donovan proposed five design values for ethical tech use in migration justice: mutuality, placement, redress, hospitality, and discretion.
These values call for a deeper rethinking of how technology intersects with lived experiences. “To value the placement of a person or interaction,” he said, “is to consider the spatiotemporal conditions in which they exist”—rather than flattening human life into abstract data points optimized for efficiency.
Quoting Mutuality in El Barrio, a book by Fordham faculty Carey Kasten and Brenna Moore, Donovan emphasized the need to move “from research as extraction to a model more grounded in mutuality and co-creation.”
The Path Ahead
Donovan concluded by acknowledging that while accompaniment through technology is possible, it demands vigilance: AI can support or sabotage the work of justice depending on who controls it, and how it’s deployed.
“I looked for examples of AI being used in purely humanitarian ways with migrant communities, and I couldn’t find one,” he said.
So, how can we use AI ethically?
Perhaps there is no answer, at least not yet.
We may not be able to control how corporations use AI, but we can refuse to be complicit. And amidst our current contentious political climate, empathy has become our most crucial weapon against those trying to extort, control, and manipulate their power and resources.
Ultimately, valuing the full humanity of every human being—especially those who need our protection—is true accompaniment, which is the mission of Fordham’s Initiative on Migrants, Migration and Human Dignity.
Watch the full talk to dive deeper into Donovan’s research and hear his proposed design values for just technology here: