Blood,sweat and tears: On the corporeality of deportation

Abstract

It is hard to imagine how deportation regimes could function without the threat or the exercise of force. Yet surprisingly a focus on forces and bodies, and more generally the question of corporeality, has rarely been foregrounded by migration scholars looking at deportation. Academic study of clandestine border crossing as well as detention abounds with descriptions and theorization at the level of the body. Why not deportation? Building on fieldwork with cantonal police units in Switzerland between 2015 and 2017, this paper calls for scholars of deportation to take corporeality seriously. We follow some of the corporeal practices implemented by state actors and related experts and authorities to understand how bodies feature in removal practices in terms of senses, feelings, affects, nerves, pulses, breathing. Violence overarches this scene, but it is by no means the whole story in the state’s struggle for sovereignty and racialised removal, since we should equally register the other moves that are integral to deportation operations such as calming, monitoring, medicating, consoling, dressing, undressing, and inspecting. To overlook the corporeal is to risk producing an overly sanitized, cleansed, tidy depiction of deportation.

Introduction: The jaws of power

Most migration scholars would puzzle at the claim that immigration enforcement bore any institutionalized connection to the human jaw. ¹ They would look askance at the suggestion that there was something mandibular about the policing of borders. Yet if we are prepared to think about practices of deportation along lines that connect the most localized, corporeal scale of power, a power exercised over and through the body, with that of the governance of states, if we open ourselves to these intimate geographies of power (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006) and their imbrication in geopolitics, it is possible to see that such a connection does exist. The human jaw, it turns out, is a stake and a zone of intervention within contemporary practices of deportation.

[T]he mandibular angle technique is a safe technique. The risks deriving from its correct application are small and the margin for error sufficiently wide as to make the risks of incorrect application similarly small. (IAPNCM Independent Advisory Panel on Non-Compliance Management, 2014: 40)

These are the words of the Independent Advisory Panel on Non-Compliance Management (IAPNCM), an expert committee of doctors, prison experts and magistrates convened by the UK Home Office in 2014 to investigate the problem of how best to handle ‘non-compliant’ people undergoing deportation. The mandibular angle technique in question consists in the manual application of pain to the jaw for a short duration (‘five seconds’) in order ‘to secure a detainee’s compliance’ (IAPNCM, 2014: 40). It was one of 12 ‘proposed techniques’ the Panel came up with for exercising force while minimizing the potential for harm. At the same time, it is about the handling of a potentially recalcitrant body, its placement, and positioning and how it is best bent to the will of migration enforcers. Criticism of such violent treatment of deportees at the hands of detainee custody officers (DCOs, or ‘escorts’ as they are euphemistically termed) in the UK rose with a fatal incident involving a man being expelled from the UK to Angola. In 2010 Jimmy Mubenga was killed at the hands of three DCOs on a British Airways aircraft waiting to depart Heathrow Airport. Outsourcing is widespread across European states and their immigration enforcement regimes and in the UK case the three escorts worked for the global security firm G4S. While the G4S guards were acquitted of the charge of murder, the incident focused attention on the violence of the methods that private security actors were using in their attempts to subdue deportees on planes and in other situations in their quest to extract them from their communities and remove them from the UK. So, when the independent panel met, the search for a ‘bespoke approach to safe escorting’ (IAPNCM, 2014: 3) was at the top of its agenda; a ‘restraints package’ that ‘avoids force whenever possible’ (ibid. 3) - by no means an easy circle to square.

This unsettling vignette on techniques of pain inducement sets the scene for the two core arguments we make in this paper. First, we argue that studies of deportation should focus much more fully on questions of corporeality, and especially questions about the exercise of force at the level of the body by other bodies. Deportation is one of many forms of state violence (including policing and incarceration) that discloses nation states' struggles over sovereignty and racialized exclusion often implemented through micro-level practices. Studying deportation violence through the body, we trace ‘the translation of sovereignty from the macro level of a nation-state to the micro level of deported individuals’ (Radziwinowiczówna, 2020: 1107; see also Boehm, 2011). While some scholars have recognized that deportation is an extremely corporeal practice (Hodge, 2019; Khosravi, 2009; Walters, 2017), studies of deportation are much more likely to foreground laws, institutions, or protest movements than they are questions of embodiment. With certain important exceptions (Kanstroom, 2012; Makaremi, 2017; Sambor, 2021), even more materialist-inflected research on deportation, which brings in themes of spatiality, technology and affect, has seldom engaged with corporeality. We are struck at how rarely the question of bodies, forces, and entanglements appears in scholarship about deportation. In this paper we follow some of the corporeal practices implemented by state actors and related entities to understand how bodies feature in removal practices in terms of senses, feelings, affects, nerves, pulses, breathing. Violence – often physical - overarches this scene, but it is by no means the whole story since one needs equally to register the other moves that are integral to deportation operations such as calming, monitoring, consoling, befriending, exhausting, medicating, dressing, undressing, and inspecting. These practices of ‘care’ may seem benevolent, but really ‘handle’ the body to prepare it for removal and therefore retain a double-edged nature.

Second, we start with this vignette about the jaw to make an argument about method. We argue that while it is necessary and important to engage with official reports and manuals, such as that of the IAPNCM, which document and justify the ‘technification of violence’ (Makaremi, 2009) and give rich insight about corporeality, it is no way sufficient. In addition, we need to consider the way these kinds of techniques are put into use; how they operate in actual situations; to examine lived practices. The second aim of the paper is therefore to show how ethnographic approaches afford us glimpses of these techniques, and these embodiments in action. Drawing on field work that is based on observations and semi-structured interviews conducted within the Swiss deportation regime, and working abductively (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012), this paper will offer insights and concepts that can be used to promote and widen this angle of research. We wish to foreground the corporeality of deportation procedures through a close look at the interaction between the deportees’ body, tools of deportation and practices implemented by state actors. Throughout, we insist it is not only the corporeality of the deportee that is at stake, but the embodiment of these other actors as well.

Through this engagement we advance knowledge on the corporeality of deportation practices that include the use of restraint, drugs, or force that is placed upon the body and thus become palpable. Deportation practices are messy and discomforting. Ultimately, we argue for greater symmetry in the way that migration researchers represent and make sense of deportation. Scholarship documents at length the techniques of hiding, deceiving, intimidating and cajoling that smugglers and traffickers use to create migration routes across heavily policed borders, and the play of domination and struggle between these ‘clandestine’ actors, migrants and state authorities (e.g., Mainwaring and Brigden, 2016). We argue that a fuller understanding of deportation requires us to recognize that the legalized expulsion and forced movement of people by liberal-democratic states utilizes a whole range of techniques which also have the body as their medium and their target (see Menjívar and Abrego, 2012; Pratt, 2001). Legalized expulsion is no less embodied. We hope that by making this more explicit we can contribute to a fuller reckoning with the costs and stakes of deportation today.

Migration and corporeality

The body within studies of migration control

States govern and target bodies in their everyday policy implementation and work upon them in different ways. Within the field of migration, the corporeality of asylum and enforcement procedures is expressed through border controls, within asylum application procedures, in detention and removal. The body becomes ‘a site at which precarity is produced and contested’ (Mavin, 2019: 26). Its disposability is a condition inscribed upon it (Razack 2017: 2).

Border studies explore the techno-legal scrutiny that some bodies face, for example through biometric controls or DNA testing in order to assess family relations, vis-à-vis migrants contesting such governing of their mobility (Dijstelbloem, 2021; Scheel, 2019). Borders treat the body as site of regulation by imposing travel restrictions on it or - during the COVID-19 pandemic – subjecting ‘the infected’ to surveillance (Shachar and Mahmood, 2021). Scanning and tracing bodies is thus a regularity in migration and border control.

Within the field of asylum, the body has been highlighted as a site of power and domination; it becomes evidence for the age of alleged unaccompanied minors or of experienced torture and medicalized to fit in nation states’ increasingly narrow definition of asylum (Fassin and D’Halluin, 2005). A physical mark of violence can become translated into readable evidence that justifies the right to remain, whereas a lack of bodily evidence might derail a case.

A bodily focus is especially common in detention studies (Dow, 2007; Razack, 2017). ‘While in the 19th century the object of criminal punishment shifted from the “body” to the “soul”, the object of the penal practices employed in immigration penality is firmly fixated on the body. The objective is bodily subjection, control and ultimately expulsion, no more, no less’ (Pratt, 2001: 60). Detention becomes a site of deterrence in which migrants are punished both physically and mentally, forced to endure uncertainty (Khosravi, 2009), for example, through the constant shifting between detention centres (Bosworth, 2014; Hiemstra, 2013), which symbolizes how the body becomes an object onto which power is asserted (see Mountz, 2018 on the general role of the body in relationships of power, space and politics). Being reduced to a body (‘bodying’) simultaneously symbolizes ‘the imposition of a political identity on migrants through the use of carceral power’ (Iskander, 2019: 1374). As such, migrants can be hired by private companies to provide carceral services, such as maintenance, while being threatened with solitary confinement, or exposure to extreme temperatures (Iskander, 2019) in case they refuse and with little control over their schedule and thus their agency (Bales and Mayblin, 2018).

Within these studies we argue that bodies may always be politicizable but are not inherently political. Instead, the process of politicization takes a lot of work and is never automatic or guaranteed. One particular area of such politicization is the field of deportation, characterized by state control and contestation of migrants, as well as reactions of states to such resistance.

The body within deportation studies

Governments across Europe have announced increased removals, attempting to reduce the ‘deportation gap’ (Poletti, 2020; Rosenberger and Küffner, 2016) by exploring various strategies to implement deportation orders. Here, often, ‘the most vulnerable are targeted, precisely because they are easiest to remove’ (Fekete, 2005: 66).

Studies within this socio-spatial political field have critically examined deportees’ perspectives, traumatic psychological experiences, and the long-lasting effects on individuals (cf. Gill, 2009; Hodge, 2019; Wong, 2015) as well as their personal networks. Deportations are forceful and violent state practices and a form of legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012; Radziwinowiczówna, 2020) that is both physically and physiologically palpable (see Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, on how violence assaults dignity and personhood). These harmful experiences are often caused by structural violence (Galtung, 1969), defined by the inability to make use of resources caused by a low social status and thus high vulnerability (see also Bourgois, 2001), while it is nearly ‘impossible to identify a single actor who commits the violence’ (Gupta, 2012: 20). Such violence is impersonal and built into the structure of power or sovereignty.

However, bodily reactions towards deportations have also been discussed in regards to migrants’ agency, such as burning off fingerprints to thwart involuntary identification (Adams and Branigan, 2003), or engaging in acts of protest like cutting ones hair as a statement about the body’s uprootedness and non-belonging (Tamura, 2018) or hunger strikes as a form of resistance (McGregor, 2011). Such visible signs of resistance display the body as active site of protest (Mavin, 2019).

Scholarship underlines how removal procedures have a corporeal effect on the bodies that are ‘doubly stigmatized – polluted and polluting – both in the host society and at “home”’ (Peutz, 2006: 223). While marked as an outcast by the host society, their return subverts the idealized success story of migration (see Peutz, 2006 on how being deported in the clothes that the individual happened to be wearing at the time of apprehension might cause significant stress and harm upon arrival, e.g., for women not being covered enough; for standing out as not-belonging).

Nevertheless, while academic study of clandestine border crossing as well as detention abounds with descriptions and theorization at the level of the body, this is less so with the study of deportation processes. What explains the unevenness and asymmetry between scholarship on arrivals and circulations on the one hand and state-enforced or state-encouraged departures? Why are bodies and power theorized in studies of border control, that is when migrants are perceived as ‘arriving’, but, with notable exceptions (Khosravi 2009; Peutz, 2006; Walters, 2017), far less in studies of deportation? One factor is perhaps a fear of perpetrating a kind of ‘intellectual voyeurism’ that highlights pain and suffering and risks becoming complicit with the deportation spectacle (Coutin, 2014: 678). Another factor lies in the vested interest of states in keeping these latter processes obscured from public view (see Pratt, 2001) – at least to a certain extent. Little research access has been granted that might be used to question presented state images and their legitimacy (Suárez-Krabbe et al., 2018; Wong, 2015). Furthermore, the act of removal can often be ad-hoc and sudden, with officials exploiting the power of surprise, making it even less amenable to systematic academic scrutiny.

Access is a big part of understanding why academic research has explored the corporeality of ‘clandestine’ bordercrossing but far less that of deportation. But it is not the whole story. After all, as our opening vignette about the jaws of power illustrates, information about certain techniques of force and violence is not a secret; it is already in the public domain. Moreover, art and activism have explored the ‘technification of violence’ (Makaremi, 2017), the powers exercised over the body (e.g., Augenauf, 2011), often for the purpose of scandalizing and politicizing deportation. Here it seems there is a particular distribution of knowledge and focus. Artists, activists, and sometimes investigative journalists do foreground deportation as a very corporeal experience whereas academic researchers are much more likely to view it from the angle of law, policymaking or perhaps social movements of resistance.

We argue, however, that the relative dearth of scholarly attention to the embodied character of deportation produces a blindness to the ordinary, everyday ways that bodies are manipulated in deportation processes. Our aim is therefore to display the highly intertwined state-migrant interactions and show how resistance and authority is intimately connected within the policing of bodies. For example, the fact that potential deportees might hide razor blades and engage in self-harm allows authorities to intimately search individuals, or keep the departure dates of deportation as a secret. Through a study of such imbricated actions and reactions we can generate images and signs, which we can deconstruct ‘communicational behaviour to reveal relationships of power and genealogies of authority and social control’ (Foote and Azaryahu, 2009: 89). More importantly, the focus on the body also allows us to detect violence where it is hidden under the auspices of care, as states rely on the individuals’ ‘fitness to fly’ and thus the need to make sure that the body remains intact yet subdued.

Questions of method

Our method in this paper is to work through vignettes and examples relating to a given research field which often involve elements of auto-ethnographic writing (Razack, 2017, de Goede, 2018). There is an elective affinity between this method and the opaque character of our research field. Vignettes offer glimpses that are rich in ethnographic detail. They are partial views of a field that, because of restrictions of access, will only ever appear to researchers and publics as fragmentary, opaque and uneven. Abducting from these vignettes, but also connecting and embedding them within the broader literatures about deportation and migration control, we then develop a series of analytical points about deportation and corporeality. These points and concepts include the need to see the policing of self-harm and suicide as an integral feature of the governance of deportation, and the place of bodies within what we call racialized choreographies of power (see also Baker, 2021; Razack, 2017).

As exemplary case material we use data that one of us (Lisa Marie Borrelli) collected in Switzerland between 2015 and 2017. It takes up the role of cantonal police units whose task is the deportation of migrants with precarious legal status. Each cantonal migration office can charge such police units, which exist in cantons with a more specialized administration, with cases involving rejected asylum seekers or other groups of non-citizens that no longer have a right to reside. At the same time, these police units take care of their ‘own cases’, involving all non-citizens without a residence permit and that are apprehended e.g., by street police units. The fieldnotes and interviews deriving from six weeks of observation in one cantonal police unit were part of a broader project in which Swiss migration agencies and institutions in several other European countries were followed in their everyday work (Eule et al., 2019).

Our analysis draws primarily on the Swiss case. Yet deportation is a highly transnational field. For example, officers were in communication with other national actors (e.g. through Frontex-led deportations) and were also trained in European-wide recognized restraining techniques that needed to be used on international deportation operations. At the same time, similar research was carried out in other national contexts (see Eule et al., 2019), which suggests a wider relevance for our core arguments and concepts.

Given that our research was interested in the corporeality of deportation practices from a bureaucratic and street-level angle, data confidentiality agreements were made with those actors involved in deportation procedures, including police and migration offices. All these actors were informed about Lisa’s presence and her intentions to study the migration and deportation regime. During the bureaucrats’ everyday work, practices of detention, including the standardized use of shackles, or handcuffs, were examined, and critically analysed (Bosworth and Kellezi, 2014; also see work by Hall, 2010). Since Lisa followed street-level bureaucrats in their everyday work, the data also contains deportation procedures, meetings with respective deportees (at the migration office or in detention) and exchanges with further actors (such as other migration offices and police units, lawyers, legal advisors, the State Secretariat for Migration and more). Some of these meetings and encounters were ephemeral, happened ad hoc or were highly tensed. When possible, Lisa introduced her role as researcher, though part of her interest lay also in the meaning- and sense-making that her interlocutors (here bureaucrats) did around her presence. It was thus not always possible to disclose her role in each encounter. Aware of this shortcoming, we wish to highlight that the observations included individuals whose lives are already extensively documented by other entities and argue that not taking up these observations ‘leaves the construction of their stories to others’ (Hallett and Gruner-Domic, 2019: 3) and would eventually silence the witnessed violence. However, we understand that the presented material displays a high vulnerability and violence in which the role of us as researchers needs to be discussed and reflected in an ongoing process.

Enforcing deportation in everyday work

Vignette 1: ‘It would have been better to leave voluntarily’

Today’s deportation concerns a Sri-Lankan woman, P, ² who had first arrived in Malta and is thus supposed to be sent back according to the Dublin Regulation, which regulates that the first country of arrival shall be the country in which individuals apply for asylum and in which other claims (for residency, etc.) shall be made.

On our way to the temporary housing facility, the three specialized officers discuss when a thorough check of the deportee and her belongings should be conducted. They remark several times that the deportee is highly suicidal and thus want to avoid her carrying any harmful items with her. Officers repeatedly tell me, that individuals hide razor blades in their mouths that they later use to harm themselves. Upon our arrival, Z, the director of the temporary housing facility briefly welcomes us, then disappearing quickly along with other staff. Z mentions they try to maintain a positive mood and do not like to be associated with deportations, as it jeopardizes the trust between them and the people living there. After the officers enter the deportee’s room and evaluate the situation, they quickly decide to fully immobilise her because she is not willing to leave and refuses to move. The officers pack her belongings in big duffle bags, sealed and put in the trunk of the car, after the deportee herself is carried into it, though theoretically still able to walk herself, but refusing to move. All this takes less than an hour. In the car, the woman keeps shouting and crying, her voice ringing in our ears. Later, the translator mentions that she had cried out the name of Jesus, saying she did not want to go and accusing Switzerland of lacking humanity.

Partway to the airport, the woman starts hyperventilating, then becomes rather quiet and shortly after starts throwing up. She also tells the staff that she has having trouble to breathe while the officers to both sides of her make sure that she throws up into a bag. The medical staff member regularly checks her pulse, and states that she believes the woman is fine. She then offers her a sedative to calm down the hyperventilation, yet not allowed to force her to take any. The woman refuses. The medical pack includes common medication, though nothing against nausea, leaving the medic surprised. At some point, the woman becomes quiet, as if she has lost her energy. The officials unanimously decided to abort the ride to the airport and instead bring her to the nearest detention facility, as they cannot imagine that she would board the flight on her own free will. Upon arrival, the translator explains the next steps to her. He later informs me, ‘I already told her that it would have been better to leave voluntarily, just with a medical company, but she did not want to. Now I also told her that next time, she will be placed on a special flight.’ Before we leave the prison facility, I can see that the woman has been undressed, given paper underwear (to not be able to strangle herself with any fabric). She is placed in a secured cell where it is assumed that she cannot hurt herself because there are no sharp edges, and the walls are soft. Once detention staff decides that she calmed down, she will be placed in a regular cell with her own clothes again. (Swiss cantonal police unit, fieldnotes, 2017)

Vignette 2: ‘We really had to work properly’

Police officer C tells me about some deportation flights I missed during my absence. Two weeks prior, they had had a flight ‘where [they] really had to work properly.’ C smiles, seemingly happy about the challenging physical work. ‘An Egyptian (Q) and one from Eritrea. The Egyptian was stopped on the streets. When I opened his detention [meaning he visited him in detention and told him that he was going to stay there for a while], he was still friendly, gave me his hand. He was of course not happy to be detained. But when the word “Rome” came out, he flipped out completely.’ C makes a violent and abrupt gesture, pretending to smash his head into the table, repeating it twice. C indicates that the person was a Dublin deportee whose asylum claim should have been decided in Italy and continues:

‘I needed to hold him, and then he sat an entire week in the guarded ward of a hospital and afterwards in a security cell for a whole week, until his flight. He rubbed his arms open on the walls, again and again smashed his head into the wall. In the meantime, they wanted to locate him to another floor, but while escorting him to the other floor, he tried to escape. He also went all the way [the entire deportation process] with a helmet. And later, the Italians took him straight to Cairo. He probably sensed it. He did not know, but the Italians had told us straight away when they wanted to have him and where exactly.’

C then describes another incident:

‘Then, we had someone who was supposed to go to Düsseldorf. He actually wanted to go, but was not really happy about being detained, since he wanted to leave voluntarily. He was a DEPU [deportation, unaccompanied]. But they all talk, and when I told him during our second meeting about the flight, he replied that he would only leave if he received money. He was so arrogant. But I explained that this was Dublin and that there was no money. On the day of his departure, they needed to carry him completely into the transport, immobilized and all, but in the moment when they arrived at the airport, he walked into the aircraft by himself. Why? Well, he knew that he would be back here [in detention] if he refused to leave—but why does one go through all the hassle in the first place?’ (officer C, Swiss cantonal police unit, fieldnotes, 2017)

Policing self-harm and suicide

A woman at elevated risk of suicide, checked for a razor blade hidden in her mouth. A man who rubs his arms against his cell walls for days until they bleed and tear open. A striking thread running through both these vignettes and the disturbing events they recount is the prevalence of self-harm and the risk of suicide amongst people facing detention and deportation. It is a thread that should force us to re-examine what we understand by the violence of deportation. This violence consists not only in the techniques of force which the state has authorized for use in policing encounters, not to mention the ad hoc, improvised, or spontaneous ways in which officials coerce, cajole, intimidate, and sometimes beat their targets. It also consists in the grim litany of ways in which people facing deportation harm themselves. And it is countered and shadowed by administrative and medical care whose core aim is to ensure an intact body that is ‘fit to fly’. Indeed, so ubiquitous are such practices of self-harm and counter-care that they should be considered not as merely incidental so much as a systemic feature of the violence of deportation. Here we draw an analogy with one of the most famous and influential theorizations of the violence of colonial power. Speaking of his experiences in Algeria, Fanon (1963) remarks that colonial power manifests itself not only in the domination of a people but an interiorization of distress such that all manner of mental illnesses appear in the colonized (as well as the colonizer). Colonialism, he suggested, was a ‘fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals’ (Fanon, 1963: 249). One can say something not dissimilar of the power of deportation. Its violence does not only materialize in the relations between officials and their subjects, or between detainees forced to live in desperate conditions, but in the various harms that, as a result of their situation, people undergoing detention and/or facing deportation enact upon themselves.

Scholars have debated how detention and deportation affects mental health and physical wellbeing (Akhtar, 2012; Joseph, 2014). They have explored ways in which self-harm is often used as a form of resistance, for example, injuring oneself so as to be deemed unfit to fly (Corporate Watch, 2020). Indeed, it would seem that the phenomenon of self-harm as tactics of protest and resistance is perhaps the main way in which questions of corporeality and embodiment have been explored in the study of deportation (McGregor, 2011; Ruedin et al., 2018). Here we make a somewhat different if connected point which is to reflect on the operations and changes that the prevalence of self-harm induces in the governance of deportation. It is to recognize that the governance of this scenario is a systematic and integral feature of the deportation process. The mouth must be checked for razor blades. P must be separated from all her possessions. Q must be held down the moment he is told of his imminent removal, and then held first in a guarded ward of a hospital and then a security cell. The same man will be forced to wear a helmet for the duration of his journey.

Some might call this a power and a duty of care exercised over the deportee. We insist on calling this the policing of self-harm and suicide. Here we use the term ‘police’ with a meaning that is closer to its eighteenth-century association with police science, where police is about administration, and ensuring security and order (Foucault, 2007; Neocleous, 2013). To speak of policing in this context is not to suggest that care is absent, or to deny that in many cases the officials responsible are lacking in any sense of genuine concern or human empathy. Immigration officials are for the most part ordinary people, not monsters, and they often struggle with the ethics of their work (Bosworth 2012; Kalir 2019). If we call this work policing, it is to clarify its overarching logic as well as the forms of its exercise. For often it is about anticipating risks, searching for risky materials, neutralizing conflictual situations, incapacitating people when they rebel, and ensuring order. Identifying the policing of self-harm is essential since it discloses ostensible care as part of a set of violent practices that support corporeal violence and ‘a racialized logic of capitalist economic expansion’ (Baker, 2021: 126).

While it is the mitigation of self-harm and suicide that provides the practical and ethical justification for a great deal of the force that officials exercise in the conduct of their duties, we cannot proceed as though that is end of the story. A woman stripped of her clothes and given only paper underwear for the night on the grounds that anything more could be turned into an instrument of suicide is such a troubling image that it somehow overflows the practical and official justifications for such practices. Just as the adult diapers that the US military forced upon the terror suspects undergoing extraordinary rendition were never just about the practicalities of long-distance transportation of bodies that defaecate and urinate (D’Arcus, 2015), just as these practices and devices which the US applied to their detainees could also be read as vengeful operations of humiliation and degradation (see also Razack, 2017), we suggest that there is usually a semiotic and psychic surplus whenever bodies are manipulated in the name of preventing self-harm. In vignette #1, the flimsiness of paper underwear thus becomes part of the power being exercised over a subject. Nowhere is this surplus revealed more clearly than in the very moment when these devices and procedures are wielded as a threat; when the recalcitrant subject is told: calm down or we will do this to you. Come quietly or you will be placed on a ‘special flight’. At the same time the use of flimsy paper underwear becomes a symbol of the ephemeral or volatile aspects of deportation. Caught between sometimes years of procedural preparation, negotiation and resistance, the practice itself might be quick, unexpected and leave very little evidence once the body is removed.

Bodies are imbricated in struggles and power relations, struggles that are polymorphous and multidimensional. Hence, if authorities explore the efficacy, legitimacy, and risk of different ‘holds’ and ‘restraining devices’, it is because people struggle against removal, but also because earlier rounds of struggle have ruled out certain practices. This is a point we return to in the following section. It means that we need to understand struggles on multiple timescales as well.

Racialized choreographies of power

When the police team arrives at the temporary housing facility to remove P, the director and some staff come out to meet them then soon hurry away. Deportation often involves hiding the deportees from the eye of the public but here it is the director and staff who must hide. They must disappear lest some of the detainees glimpse them fraternizing with the police team. For the police team are the ‘bad guys’, the ones who do the dirty work. The staff have spent time trying to cultivate a ‘positive mood’, building relationships of trust with the detainees. They have invested in a certain kind of social and moral capital which will quickly diminish should they be too closely associated with the police and other agents who work on the harsher side of things.

We highlight this little moment of handover within the custodial chain of deportation because it underscores that any discussion of the corporeality of expulsion is limited, reductionist and in fact a form of fetishism if it dwells only on the body of the deported. ³ We have to remember that all sorts of bodies are at play and what matters is how these bodies interact, how they move, clustering here, dispersing there; and how and what they signify. For the police and for other bureaucrats of immigration enforcement, deportation is work, and often very physical work, as the officer in vignette #2 emphasizes. The deportation process has its choreographies of power: the way in which the police are trained to interact with deportees, gathering around them here, walking them this way to a waiting bus or indeed onto a plane, seating them like so, pinning them down like that. Then there are considerations of physique: given the size and weight of the deportee, will these escorts be the appropriate body size? ⁴ Even the way these official bodies are dressed, this is also a calculated element in the enactment of deportation. ⁵

A consideration of these choreographies is important also because it can nuance the way we understand race and racism within deportation processes. It helps us grasp some of the ways in which race operates as a kind of ‘absent presence’ (M’charek et al., 2014), so palpably there, before our eyes yet at the same time absent and elusive. After all, most politicians and policymakers will insist deportation is not ethnic cleansing or racial persecution; it is the race-blind enforcement of immigration and asylum law. And yet European deportations frequently present us with the scene of a Black or Brown-skinned person surrounded by White people. It is the scene of P sat in the back of the car, flanked by the police. The scene of Q bundled into a secure cell. And on the ‘special flight’ it might be the scene of 30 Black people vastly outnumbered by a phalanx of 100 or more, mostly White police and medical authorities. Building on the corporeal feminist theory of Elizabeth Grosz, Slocum (2008) calls for attention to the ‘materiality of race rather than its representation or performance’. As she puts it: ‘Race emerges through the movement, clustering and encounter of phenotypically differentiated bodies’ (2008: 849). This insight applies equally to the way bodies mix and interact in these removal processes.

As with the provision of blankets, medical attention and care seems to heighten whenever it’s tied to the objective and instrumentality of ushering people out of the territory, offering some kind of ‘care’ until a person is removed (and to some extent afterwards), but also disclosing a non-compliance management system with a cruel duality. This ‘benevolent violence’ ‘occurs when coercive means are used to uphold the state’s benevolent or ameliorative goals and when the state’s ameliorative practices have violent effects’ (Barker, 2017: 121). Yet, such benevolent legitimation does not exhaust all possibilities of violence. While authorities are not at liberty to implement just any practice, since laws and norms striate the space-time of deportation and operate as obstacles and challenges to enforcement practices, there are many areas that escape or sidestep them. ⁶ The act of corporeal removal then is strongly intertwined within racial hierarchies of the helping ‘Western’ state, that at the same time takes ‘away the bodily pollution of an anti-citizen, [to preserve] the purity of society. Thus, removal of each anti-citizen can be seen as a worship of nationhood or a celebration of citizenship’ (Khosravi, 2009: 52).

Removals incorporated

Faced with a man who resists his deportation when he learns there is to be no payment offered to him as an allowance/incentive, confronting a woman who refuses to leave her room in the temporary housing facility, the police teams proceed to immobilize the subject and move them like objects. In the latter case, the woman’s possessions are packed and sealed into large duffle bags. Like the bags, P is loaded into the car. Several police officers and migration officials refer to the individuals as ‘packages’ that can be sealed and dispatched. A moment’s reflection on the word ‘removal’ is instructive here. Long before this term came to serve as an official euphemism for deportation, one of its most common associations, in English, was with the business of moving office or house. The removal company is the team who comes in to expertly and swiftly pack up your entire household, carefully loading your artefacts and furniture into padded boxes and cartons so that it can be safely and efficiently shipped to your new home. Removals, inc. In some ways this is the political fantasy of deportation: that people can be removed like goods. Packed up, shipped off. Perhaps this semantic overlap helps us to understand the importance of the network of detention centres (and custodial chains), that system of confinement that operates as a backbone of the deportation regime. It is no coincidence that these detention centres are sometimes clustered around major international airports (Bosworth, 2012: 127): they are to deportation what the vast network of warehouses and customer satisfaction centres is to a logistics company like Amazon. ⁷ Deportation is not cheap: detention centres warehouse people, holding out the promise that when seats are booked on a Lufthansa flight, or indeed when an entire plane is chartered – those ‘special flights’, the threat of which our police teams wield like a baton – there will be a dependable supply of deportees to fill the seats (see Baker, 2021).

But of course, people are not household items, even if both are sometimes damaged in transit. Furniture does not cry, swear, condemn the nation for its inhumanity, or appeal to Jesus for salvation. Furniture does not hyperventilate or vomit when moved. No one checks its pulse in transit. Deportation is a power exercised over living beings and as such has to take account of their bodily flows. Now, metaphors of flow and liquidity are commonplace in the contemporary social sciences, and especially in migration studies. Indeed, a language of flows has recently been used to shift understanding of deportation beyond the image of a ‘discrete’, ‘unidirectional’ practice, towards a conception of diverse practices and multiple mobilities (Weber et al., 2019: 65). While we are sympathetic to the latter suggestion, here we want to note that when we refocus our attention from the scale of global movements towards the corporeal, when we encounter deportation as visceral and embodied, we come to realize it is awash with fluids and flows in a quite literal sense. Urine, faeces, spit, blood, sweat, tears, vomit, mucus – all these liquids need to be mopped up, absorbed, bagged, stemmed, channelled, disinfected, disposed if the wheels of the deportation machine are to keep turning. And yet there is still overflow: the medic regrets that she has no medication in her kit to treat P’s nausea. Despite the ‘best intentions’ and careful plans, you cannot always anticipate how the body will act.

If the removal of people differs from the removal of furniture in these ways, it also differs because humans can act tactically, even in the most cramped circumstances. Note how the medic offers P a sedative. Yet P refuses this drug. Is she being mindful that if she accepts it, if she undergoes sedation her fate will be sealed, and she will more readily be transferred to the plane? We can’t say. Whatever the grounds of her action, we should note that something has changed in this little interaction. Perhaps twenty years ago this sedative would not have been offered as a choice. There would have been no game of informed consent. P would have been forcibly injected, tranquilized, turned into luggage. While the precise history of the use of sedation and other forms of pharmacological governance remains opaque, and while stories of forced sedation do circulate today (Jirát and Hanimann, 2013), it may be the use of drugs within European deportation practices is now more conditional and less common than it was. Does this mean that the conduct of deportation has become more humane, that its policing is now more observant of the human rights of the deported? We hesitate to say. What we can say is that the very embodied struggles we have described here, struggles that go on in cars and vans, in holding cells and waiting areas, in airports and planes, in the streets and in the courts, these struggles play out on a terrain that is not fixed but itself shaped by previous rounds of struggle and by other events. The practices that make up deportation, practices of policing, practices of resistance, each has its own little history.

Stops, starts, reversals, repeats

While helpful in fostering a more mobile and dynamic account of deportation, notions of flow and custodial chains still don’t adequately capture what is often an improvised and non-linear activity. Removals play out at different paces and spaces, the change of places might be triggered by and are reactive to the deportee’s own behaviour: a different detention centre, a special room, special underwear, a special flight. The multiplication of spaces, paces and practices complicates any notion of deportation as a straight line or a smooth operation. Again, we find a reaction to potential resistance and thus a network that resembles a decision matrix. If X happens then Y should be done and again, we find rules that resemble rules of a game in which the player, here police officers, find an answer as how to act when playing it through, leaving multiple options that might generate different results. It is not just the fact people are moved from place to place, generating ‘chaotic’ geographies (Hiemstra, 2013) that causes uncertainty and distress for those deported, but how these movements correlate with different embodied states - anxiety, panic, exhaustion, calming, despair, etc. and how deportation regimes have made up rules as to how to respond, disclosing the element of calculation in all of it. As much as this decision matrix then generates uncertainty for migrants, it is put in place to reduce uncertainty for the bureaucrats. Indeed, the danger of assuming that total immobilization is self-evident neglects a play in which there are switches, decisions, calculations, emotions on all sides. It echoes the process on some deportation charter flights where each detainee is supposed to be asked if they are prepared to ‘go quietly’, otherwise they are shackled. And sometimes they are shackled irrespective of their answer (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, 2018). So, these techniques and devices are not applied universally or automatically but amidst assessments, interrogations, interactions and in context of bodies acting and reacting. As such, aborting the attempt to deport might not necessarily represent a failure so much as being one move in a broader choreography of removal, since all is sorted. Indeed, we find ourselves in a situation much like described in Kafka’s stories - there is always another room, always another door waiting.

Conclusion

While we certainly observed determined resistance to deportation in this paper, ours is not a study of embodied resistance. Rather, it can be read as a critical reflection on the kind of measures which the immigration authorities have developed in response to resistance. This resistance to resistance can be disclosed by highlighting corporeality, depicted in the observed, sometimes grisly situations. Yet, our aim is not to claim a more realistic account of deportation. In fact, what we present is not an exposé, for this kind of information is a kind of ‘open secret’ (Roberts, 2012): it is already widely-circulated within numerous human rights reports, news stories, migrant testimonies, solidarity networks and legal cases. But this corporeal face of deportation is not prominent or foregrounded in the scholarly literature, especially in political science and sociology. So, our more modest aim is to give this face of deportation more presence in scholarly accounts. It is necessary to give the corporeal dimension greater attention alongside the legal, policy and institutional approaches which dominate this field.

Why? Not just to fill a ‘gap’ in the literature! If we overlook the corporeal, we risk presenting an overly sanitized, cleansed, tidy depiction of deportation. Following Gibney (2013), a case can be made for viewing deportation not as a sui generis phenomenon, as it often appears, but as another form of forced migration. Just because it is the state or its deputies twisting limbs, injecting veins, intimidating people and moving them by surprise under cover of darkness, this is not a reason to treat such practices as merely incidental or secondary to the study of institutions, laws, and policies. These powers, both formal and informal, exercised on and through nerves, veins, limbs, skin, hearts and minds are just as much a part of deportation as laws, institutions, and bureaucracies. Indeed, as we have shown, they are entangled in these very phenomena.

However, this focus on the corporeality of deportation is valuable for two further reasons which should also be of interest to borders and migration studies. First, it speaks to debates about deportation and sovereignty. It is commonplace for politicians to rationalize deportation programmes as a vital defence of the nation’s borders and a reassertion of the state’s imperilled sovereignty. But we have shown how this sovereignty finds expression at a micro-level, exercised over and through the bodies of the deported, but equally through the bodies of those tasked with carrying out removals and the racialized choreographies effected by their action and reactions. This micro-level does not stop at the surface of the body. It is not the body understood as a singular object. Instead, the body is resolved into a multiplicity of sites and processes: a jaw that can be manipulated to effect compliant behaviour, a head that must be padded to minimize self-inflicted trauma, a mouth that must be searched for razor blades. The deportable body as a zone of tactics and counter-tactics.

Second, we have shown that the violence that is immanent to these practices of deportation is complex and multi-faceted. This is especially because it is entangled with operations of care and concern. Yet these operations have a highly-instrumental character. While the officials may or may not experience genuine concern and even empathy with regards to their subjects, the overall context is one that makes the prevention of self-harm an instrument in the effective management of deporation. While self-harm has long been identified as a disturbing feature of detention and deportation as well as a form of embodied resistance, in this paper we have called for scholarship to focus specifically on the way in which the policing of self-harm and suicide has emerged as a new territory in the governance of deportation. This suggests a cruel irony that future research should investigate further: whatever harm befalls those who are forcibly expelled to countries where their lives and livelihoods are at risk, such harm seems to have as one of its conditions of possibility the effective prevention or minimization of self-harm during the operation of deportation itself.