This paper will present facets of a larger project tracing genealogies of ‘border criminality’ in Algeria from annexation into the French metropole (1848) to the present day. It seeks to contextualize and demystify the current state-enforced lethality of trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean crossings through a long diachronic view. The main contention of the larger project is that the deployment of deterritorialized/externalized policing and carceral apparatuses for the purpose of surveilling, controlling, racializing, and criminalizing the ‘undesirable’ mobility of certain (Black, brown, racially Muslim) subjects is not an invention of neoliberal orders under globalization. Rather, to better understand contemporary border regimes, we must attend to the coloniality and racializing effect of intensified punitive and carceral controls surrounding presumed ‘disorderly’ or ‘dangerous’ mobility. At the same time, my hope is to broaden historiographic attention to multiplicities of carceral logics, including not only modes of confinement (imprisonment, detention, internment, house arrests) but also myriad forms of displacement (deportation, punitive relocation, labour camps, and convict colonies, to name a few). Within the scope of this larger project, this paper engages with state archives of the colonial mobility policing regime and pass-system in Algeria, which reached its height during the period from 1881 to 1914. My research objects are a set of penal, judicial, and bureaucratic instruments either created or codified during this period – including land sequestration, identity papers, passports, travel permits, house arrests, vagrancy laws, administrative detention, and relegation (deportation). Under this system, ‘native’ subjects were obliged to carry a passport, travel permit, or work permit to leave their own arrondissement, and to register with the mayor’s office of any municipality they entered for longer than a day; they were forbidden to camp ‘illegally’ on non-Frenchified (privatized) land or to ‘give asylum’ to individuals traveling without permits. Travel outside Algeria, particularly for religious pilgrimage, was a privilege reserved only for ‘good,’ compliant subjects. At the same time, this archive hardly reproduces colonial imaginaries of mastery and control; indeed, it is a record largely generated by autochtonous resistance and defiance, to the constant frustration of colonial law-makers and enforcers. It is these acts of Algerian resistance, counter-veillance, non-cooperation, knowing silence, and feigned and real ignorance of ‘the law’ that informs my approach to these archives.