In this paper, passports are investigated as socio-technical artifacts with the capacity of interrogating the relation between design and politics. While they might appear as ‘trivial’ objects for some, passports tend to speak to the current political regime of mobility and more importantly immobility that produces refugee populations and undocumented migrants waiting in camps, transit zones or precarious clandestinity for several months and years. This inquiry in two parts aims to interrogate the artifacts of passport and its artifactual relations and practices – which I call passporting – in relation to the ways in which mobilities and immobilities are organized, controlled, regulated and shaped. Part I presents three interrelated ways of looking at passports: first, the historicity of passports and the ways in which technologies and material practices merge with the political, social and economic interests of specific times and spaces; second, the ways passports function and perform in a network of relations and ecologies which produce continuity as well as uncertainty with different effects, forms and scales in different environments; third, how passports and bodies change their positions constantly in the world in which the difficulties and uncertainties to locate either and/or become desirable space and time for manipulating and exercising power over undesired groups and individuals in local sites through a global rationale.