Bureaucratic and benign? The violent continuum of Home Office reporting in the UK

Abstract

The border, the body, immigration reporting centres, and detention facilities, the violence of border regimes operates across these sites through a continuum, successively steering migrants towards subjugation, destitution and removal. Adopting a feminist framing of violence, which attends to the inherent interconnectedness between different sites and scales of violence, this paper focuses on immigration reporting to examine how its sites and practices enact various forms of violence over migrant bodies. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with asylum-seekers in Bristol and Salford, I argue that a host of spatiotemporal practices produce various forms of violence which become intimately inflicted and experienced, and yet which are inextricably tethered to the foundational logics of sovereign state politics. How reporting sites and processes function reflect the contemporary means through which violence is both imposed and concealed on those who have been categorised as ‘unwanted’ by the state.

Introduction

Every other Tuesday, Mohammed ¹ wakes early. He rarely sleeps well anymore, but especially on immigration reporting days. After dressing, he carefully folds some extra clothing into a rucksack, along with some toiletry items. On his bedside table lays a neat stack of coins. He counts them again nervously, making sure he has the correct amount for the bus fare, and slides them carefully into his pocket. He remembers how several months ago he had had to walk the almost two-hour journey along the busy dual-carriage-way, having not managed to keep aside enough money for the bus. He tries to eat some breakfast, mindful that he does not know the next time he will be able to eat, but he struggles. On reporting days, he often struggles to eat.

Mohammed is one of approximately 90,000 migrants in the United Kingdom (UK) who is required to regularly report to the Home Office. ² Immigration reporting, often referred to as “signing” or “signing in”, is a mandatory requirement for asylum-seekers making an application to remain in Britain. The policy framework set out in the Home Office’s Instructions states that a person who is liable to detainment under the powers of Immigration Act 2016, may, as an alternative be granted temporary release with restrictions (Home Office, 2024). One of these restrictions states that individuals are required to report at regular intervals (usually weekly or bi-weekly) to an immigration reporting office or police station, as the ‘primary default alternative to detention’. ³ In practice, this means that the majority of people who have applied for asylum, or who have entered the country without proper documentation and are awaiting a decision on their immigration case are required to regularly report, with 14 reporting centres across the UK, and an estimated compliance rate of 95% (APPG, 2015). Alongside the difficulties migrants face in travelling to these often hard-to-reach sites, the Home Office utilise reporting centres for targeting potential deportees. This means that each time a person attends their appointment, they face the threat of possible arrest, detainment and removal. In this way, reporting is frequently experienced by asylum-seekers as part of a continuum of violence which seeps into their everyday life.

Within critical geopolitics, state violence is often emphasised as spatially, socially and politically separate from intimate violence, with little acknowledgement of the importance of politicised understandings of intimacy and how different forms of violence flow between the global and the intimate (Pain 2015; Pain and Staeheli 2014). As Pain contends (2015), geographers interested in politically violent phenomena have tended to focus on analysing war, terrorism and international conflict, with little to say about other, more intimate and embodied forms of violence. This tendency to disproportionately focus attention on overt, spectacular forms of violence, has resulted in a failure to understand and respond to more subtle forms of violence, or indeed crucially, to demonstrate how they are interconnected (Pain, 2014a). Moreover, too often this preoccupation has left analyses of the everyday and the intimate, somewhat overlooked. The analysis here therefore, centres on a more nuanced mapping of violence, in attending to the effects for asylum-seekers on border control sites and systems. Following Pain’s (2014a, 2015) call for critical scholarship which enables us to draw connections across different forms and sites of violence and insecurity, I explore how border control systems operate as a continuum of violence. Framing violence through a feminist lens, which advocates for analysing different forms and sites of violence as operating as a ‘single complex’ (Pain 2015: 64), I argue that immigration reporting produces an intricate web of exclusionary practices which together affirm the non-belonging of people who have been categorised as ‘unwanted’ by the state (Lindberg, 2021: 86). These strategies of harm are not inflicted through a judicial process, but are applied administratively through the bureaucratised mechanisms of state border control regimes. By operating within a guise of benign mundane activity, is also what makes them largely unaccountable.

Recent scholarship within geography has exposed the increasing violence of border regimes, where analysis has focused on the hardening of borders and the expanding use of harmful processes which dominate, control and sometimes kill migrants (see Mitchell et al., 2019; Slack and Martínez 2019). Emergent critical scholarship on border bureaucracies highlights the many guises of violence within asylum processes, revealing a discord in how these systems are supposed to approach people seeking protection and the restrictive and rigorous border regimes which are constitutive of their normal functioning (Abdelhady et al., 2021). For instance, recent work explores how states reduce migrants’ access to essential rights and services to an absolute humanitarian minimum, or render them conditional upon cooperation with authorities in asylum or deportation processes (Canning 2017; Davies et al., 2017; Johansen, 2013; Lindberg, 2021). In these examples, policy measures intersect to create a politically induced condition of impoverishment and hyper-precarity, which not only intentionally produce migrant destitution, but are integral to specific circuits of exchange and value constituted by migration control practices (Coddington et al., 2020). The practices of immigration detainment and forced removals remain stark (albeit often hidden) examples of the violent politics and patterns of globalisation, a process which itself depends on exposing racialised migrant groups to varying degrees of control, suffering and exclusion (Mayblin, 2017; Weber and Pickering, 2011). Yet their interconnectedness to the everyday intimacies which shape migrant lives is more subtle. Indeed to date, limited critical work has confronted and interrogated scale in relation to violence and the bureaucratic sites and systems of border controls and their impact.

By focusing on immigration reporting, a relatively under-researched phenomenon within academic debates regarding the lived experience of asylum, I seek to connect the bureaucratic systems of the UK’s border control measures with everyday encounters of violence. Following feminist geographers in recognising how ‘apparently incommensurate’ (Pratt and Rosner, 2012: 1) registers of violence can be part of the same continuum, I map how this particular feature of asylum policy enacts various forms of violence which is applied administratively, and often in mundane, everyday ways. Yet as Mountz and Hyndman write, ‘the intimate encompasses not only those entanglements rooted in the everyday, but also the subtlety of their interconnectedness to everyday intimacies in other places and times’ (2006: 447): in Mohammed’s case, the skipped meal to ensure he has enough money kept aside for bus fare; the long walk along a busy dual carriage way when he does not, the routinely packed rucksack in case he is detained during his reporting appointment, and the baton that hangs from the Border Enforcement officer’s belt. If, as Mountz and Hyndman (2006) suggest, the intimate inflects the global, how might a feminist analysis render visible how these seemingly disparate forms of violence are held together?

Framed as an administrative procedure designed to keep track of asylum-seekers’ whereabouts during the course of their asylum claim, I argue that immigration reporting is situated within a continuum of violence which is put to work upon migrant bodies in intimate ways. First, by exploring the spatiotemporal logics of Home Office reporting, reveals a system shaped by repeated and invasive control and surveillance strategies, enforced dependency and destitution. Second, in attending to how reporting is both a condition of immigration bail, and the ways the Home Office utilise these sites to target potential deportees, I reflect on reporting as a system which ultimately depends on the fear of possible detainment in mobilising compliance. By highlighting the role that reporting plays in expediating the removal process, I then draw out how these sites and practices are implicated in the use of physical violence in pursuit of immigration policy goals. In making explicit and drawing connections between the mundane, micro-scale and embodied experiences of asylum-seeking, this paper contributes to a growing body of work in feminist geography in advocating for a more nuanced mapping of violence within border bureaucracies.

Methods and terminology

This paper draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018. Drawing on my relationship with the pro-migrant campaigning organisation Right to Remain, I was connected with various migrant support organisations based in Bristol and Salford, both major cities in England which host asylum seekers and refugees, and with a burgeoning activist network. Fieldwork initially consisted of conducting two focus groups, each with both asylum-seekers and asylum support workers based in Bristol and Salford. Focus groups were followed up by conducting 26 in-depth interviews, including 10 with asylum-seekers and refugees, and 16 with volunteers, asylum support workers and activists involved with the various organisations based in these regions. Alongside interviews, I conducted 11 months of participant observation as a signing support volunteer at Patchway Police Station, the Home Office reporting centre located on the outskirts of Bristol. Signing support groups are local groups operating in various locations throughout the UK, which offer emotional and practical support to asylum-seekers, or “signers” during their reporting appointments. Alongside the administrative elements of the role, including helping signers to fill out any forms they may be required to complete, or directing them to various local migrant advice and support services, volunteers also make contact with an individual’s solicitor in the event of a detainment. During my time as a volunteer with the signing support group, I made around 30 pages of fieldnotes and observations, and in addition to focus groups and in-depth interviews, I spoke to approximately 30 individuals experiencing the UK’s asylum system.

As feminists have long argued, the intellectual work of research cannot be disentangled from our emotions, and in both undertaking this research, and through the writing process, I have reflected on the various, often difficult feelings that this work elicited. I include some of these reflections in this paper, in an attempt to highlight how such emotions are relevant in understanding the interpersonal interactions between researcher and participant (Bondi, 2005). In terms of the writing process itself, I was conscious of describing people’s situations with accuracy and sensitivity, without wishing to disclose intimate details of their lives, which is especially significant in the case of researching migrants without legal status. By presenting not an ethnography of people’s lives but of a concept (Sigvardsdotter, 2012), which developed around interrogating the continuum of violence individuals encounter over the course of their asylum claim, I integrate fragments of their experience within the broader narrative of the violence of border control practices that I describe.

Finally, while I use the term ‘asylum-seekers’ to collectively define the individuals subjected to reporting practices, not everyone subject to reporting requirements is an asylum seeker, since any individual subject to immigration control measures can be required to report. However, all the research participants involved in this study were either awaiting an outcome on their asylum claim, had gained indefinite leave to remain after applying for asylum, or had had an asylum claim refused and were therefore ‘failed’ asylum claimants. For simplification, I use the term asylum-seekers, whilst recognising the variant legal statuses this overlooks.

Feminist elaborations on violence

Within critical geopolitics, violence has often been characterised within a framework of exceptionality, focusing on the spectacular events and implications of global political processes, war and terrorism (Gregory and Pred, 2007; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). In adopting a conventional understanding of space and scale, these discussions emphasise state violence as spatially, socially and politically separate from intimate violence (Pain, 2015; Pain and Staeheli, 2014), thereby augmenting a notion of violence as a bounded, one-off event, often physical in form. As such, much of this work has incidentally reinforced the invisibility of violence in the everyday, intimate and embodied realm.

For decades, feminist scholars and activists have argued for recognising violence across sites and scales as closely interrelated (Pain, 2015), ‘upending’ hierarchies of space and scale (Pain and Staeheli, 2014: 344), to expose how violence is already present in the intimate realm (Conlon and Hiemstra, 2017; Pratt and Rosner, 2012). Such conceptions call forth and build on feminist geographers’ continuing interrogation of scale as ‘fluid, contingent and overlapping’ (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006: 450-51). These analyses, in contracting such binaries, allow an understanding of how seemingly distinct modes of violence operate through a single continuum (Pain and Staeheli, 2014). In so doing, they expose the ‘everywhereness’ (Pain 2015: 65) of intimate forms of violence and how they are tethered to global political projects. Such theoretical interventions make important connections between global representations of violence and the geographies of everyday life, including centring the body as a key site of violence. Drawing these connections reveals how border regimes are implicated within contemporary formations of state violence, manifested in current experiences of seeking asylum.

Recent literature on the politics of asylum has been more forthcoming in acknowledging and interrogating these interdependencies, with scholarship revealing how governments have adopted a racialised politics of intentional hostility and harm, through attending to the more surreptitious forms of insecurity, precarity and everyday suffering they produce. For instance, recent work examining the UK’s asylum system has highlighted the impact of the state’s agenda for creating and maintaining its ‘hostile environment’ for certain migrant populations. Such work reveals border management techniques shaped by destitution (Mayblin and James, 2019), surveillance (Hasselberg, 2016) and enforced insecurity and mobility (Fisher et al., 2019), exposing a politics of ‘discomfort’ (Darling 2011), coercive precarity (Shobiye and Parker, 2022) and ‘mundane’ sufferings experienced at the level of the everyday (Mayblin et al., 2020: 113). Importantly, these forms of everyday harm are as much expressions of the violent patterns of globalisation as the more explicit enactments of violence it proliferates. As Butler (2016) shows, precarity and violence are inextricably linked, as state violence is frequently enacted through distinct policies which create everyday suffering.

At a time when the UK has placed the removal of asylum-seekers at the forefront of its politics (Fakhoury and Mencütek, 2023), most recently through its proposals for offshoring asylum claimants to Rwanda, ⁴ implicating reporting in facilitating the bureaucratic components of such labour is crucial in invoking the violent continuum of border control systems. As a spatial concept, understanding violence as operating through a continuum provides a framework for tethering these different forms and sites of violence and insecurity, shifting attention towards the everyday, banal, and often less visible forms. Understanding the intimate as constituting embodied social relations, including ‘mobility, emotion, materiality, belonging, alienation’ (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006:447), I suggest that a critical engagement with violence which highlights the linkages between the different spatiotemporal relations of asylum, reveals how the everyday administrative materialities which constitute asylum-seeking, function as powerfully violent technologies that bear down subtly on migrant bodies.

This leads to my further point that a feminist lens on violence reveals how bureaucratic systems of state governance are contingent upon and ultimately effective due to their imminent potential for the use of physical force. Indeed, feminist accounts of violence also recognise how threat constitutes a particular kind of violence in itself (Pain and Staehli, 2014). Here, to insist on a distinction between actual physical violence and the invocation of fear around the possibility of such an event occurring is ultimately futile, for both ‘violence, and the threat of violence, play a crucial, constitutive role’ (Graeber, 2012: 113; Confortini, 2006) in their generation. In other words, the imminent threat of physical force is violent because it is an expression of the physical structures of hierarchical relations which constitute it (Hanmer, 1978). Recognising the crucial administrative role immigration reporting sites play in facilitating the violent tasks of detainment and removal, I show how threat and fear become mobilised through these sites and practices. By reflecting on the use of reporting sites in facilitating detention and removal, reveals not only how the Home Office instrumentalise reporting in pursuit of its immigration policy goals, but also underscores the multiscalar entanglements of violence to which asylum-seekers become exposed.

Reporting at patchway

Patchway police station is a large, modern building, its glass façade giving it a sleek, corporate feel…Inside are the archetypal milieu of doors, desks and corridors, all in a palette of varying hues of grey, white and blue. The majority of the staff that pass up and down the corridors — besides the Home Office Border Enforcement staff — wear monotone suits and carry briefcases; men wear ties, women wear smart heeled shoes. All of this gives the impression of a relatively characterless operative space typical of any administrative environment, (Fieldnotes, February 2018).

Up to 2 days of every week, Patchway police station, located on the outskirts of Bristol, England, designates one of its small, windowless offices as a space used by the Home Office, for the ordained purposes of immigration control. The only immediate indication that a part of the police station becomes regularly repurposed for reporting is a typed and laminated A4 piece of paper which serves as a makeshift sign, reading “IMMIGRATION”. This is blu-tacked onto the door of the office by the Home Office staff member each time the room is used for this purpose and taken down when it is not. The slightly askew angle at which the sign often hangs gives the impression of a somewhat amateur operation in hand.

The official purpose of reporting is to ensure contact is maintained with individuals throughout the course of their asylum claim and the actual process of reporting is conceived legally as an administrative undertaking; individuals arrive at their allotted time, wait in a queue for up to an hour, enter a small, enclosed office where a seated Home Office official verifies the individual’s presence using a computer system, and, providing there are no further questions, or additional forms to complete, they may leave. Yet as well as it being implemented as an extension to other surveillance mechanisms, reporting is also designed to expediate the removal process (Hasselberg, 2016). Indeed, one of several troubling aspects of reporting is the fact that the Home Office utilise these sites for targeting potential deportees. As Burridge (2019) finds, reporting centres thereby constitute sites of ‘potential disappearance’ into the detention and deportation infrastructure (193). During the period of my research, I witnessed an average of two detainments every month. As the account above describing Mohammed’s routine in preparing for reporting shows, the imminent threat of a possible detainment and subsequent forced removal attempt is intimately felt by individuals, making it an inordinately stressful process, and yet one which they are compelled to repeatedly engage in, very often for years on end. Moreover, due to the fact that several Home Office buildings and local police stations across the country have been closed in order to consolidate resources and cut costs (Burridge, 2019), signers face additional difficulties in financing and travelling to and from their appointments. Whilst reporting sites like Patchway operate, on-the-whole, as an administratively convenient way for keeping track of asylum-seekers’ whereabouts, they are also sites embedded with different forms of violence. These violences are as much embodied in the everyday, mundane encounters with uncertainty, waiting, and travelling, as in the more overt violence and fear of detainment and removal.

The spatiotemporal violence of reporting

Indefinite temporariness

While reporting is framed by the Home Office as a temporary measure, this is very rarely experienced as such. For many I met at the reporting centre, they had been reporting for several years, some for as long as six, seven or even up to 12 years. This is due to the fact that individuals must report to the Home Office until they receive an outcome on their immigration status. Yet for many, awaiting a conclusion on their asylum claim can take years, due largely to the tremendous backlog of asylum applications, as well as the frequency with which asylum-seekers’ first claims are refused; for most asylum-seekers the longest time is spent waiting to appeal against an initial refusal by the Home Office (Burridge and Gill, 2017: 23). Alongside the imposed unpredictability and instability which shapes daily life as an asylum-seeker, the temporal impact of reporting for years on end contributes to the experience of being gradually worn down both physically and mentally, and was evident in the demeanour of many people I met at Patchway. Each day I volunteered at the reporting centre I would witness an array of emotions displayed by those reporting including anger, despair, frustration and fear; but most often people appeared visibly fatigued.

The temporality of reporting takes its toll on the most vulnerable. Sabir, an elderly man from a country in south Asia always greeted me with a formal handshake when he arrived to report. I attributed this relative formality to his age, as he was one of the oldest I had observed reporting at Patchway. As well as being homeless and destitute, he had been detained on multiple occasions for months at a time. When I met him, Sabir had been reporting for over 6 years and was physically frail, yet was still required to report at Patchway every 2 weeks. He relied on a local charity to provide his accommodation as well as his bus fare for travelling to his reporting appointments. Similarly, Mohammed, who I introduced above, was one of the older people I met at the reporting centre, aged approximately in his late fifties. As well as having spent 2 years wrongfully detained, Mohammed had also undergone several unsuccessful deportation attempts and had also experienced bouts of homelessness. He told me about his experience requesting to reduce his reporting appointments:

I say [to the Home Office] I’m signing almost four years every two weeks, please can you postpone, make it one month or making it [every] six months, [or every] three months, some people signing three months. They say “No, what’s the reason, are you sick?” I say no, but some people sign monthly or three months, I come every two weeks, you don’t pay me for the bus or nothing.

I was struck in particular by how increasingly frail Mohammed looked each time I met him, and I found it especially troubling to picture him without somewhere to sleep. He later told me, ‘I’m tired of waiting, you can’t have a life here, I can’t have a wife or a girlfriend ‘cos I can’t get a job, I am poor. No one wants to be with someone like that.’ The personal cost of these experiences was evident in his countenance; he looked visibly fatigued and explained that he suffered from deteriorating mental health, resulting in him contemplating suicide on a number of occasions.

For some, the risk of being arrested for not attending their reporting appointment was outweighed by the financial burden that reporting entailed. Hassan was a middle-aged man from the middle east who, having been critical of the government in his country of origin, fled the country to seek asylum in the UK. Upon arrival, he was detained for several weeks at an immigration detention centre, before being released on immigration bail, and became subject to bi-weekly reporting at Patchway.

Every other week I went to the police station to sign. After four months I said I’ve ran out of money, I have no money to buy [bus] tickets, to come to the police station to sign. So I’m not going to come… I said I do not come anymore, I’m in my brother’s home, you can come there if you have any problem, you can arrest me again.

Here, Hassan describes the spatiotemporal connotations of reporting, which can have the effect of confinement, for despite the fact that individuals are not physically incarcerated, they become tethered to these difficult-to-access sites, which in Hassan’s case lasted until he received indefinite leave to remain, 2 years later. Meanwhile, similar to Mohammed, Hassan suffers from poor mental and physical health meaning he is unable to work, which he attributes in part to his experiences of seeking asylum. Both Hassan and Mohammed’s experiences attest to how the indefinite temporariness of reporting grounds down the individual, reflecting how power is exerted over the body in intimate and far-reaching ways. It is in this sense that the border becomes ‘reproduced and inscribed on the body in daily life’ (Mountz and Hyndman 2006: 452).

One of several emotionally difficult aspects of volunteering with the signing support group, for me personally, was seeing the same individuals each week, knowing they would very likely be there every week for months and years to come. In one way, it seemed to demonstrate the senselessness of the bureaucracy constituting reporting, which ensures individuals can be located for several minutes, on one particular day of the week or month. Yet, over time, the apparent absurdity of reporting as a means of surveilling people began to make sense. Individuals are repeatedly informed that reporting is a condition of their bail terms, and that if they miss an appointment, face losing their access to asylum support, rendering them homeless, or being detained and removed from the country. As well, failing to attend a reporting appointment is often presented by the Home Office as a reason not to grant asylum on the grounds of non-compliance (Pinkowska, 2019). In this way, the temporal aspects of reporting serve a double purpose, in not only instrumenting the ‘carceral continuum’ (Moran, 2013: 174), that exists beyond the walls of the detention centre, but through actually making migrants more susceptible to arrest and detention for those without the financial resources to comply, a point I will discuss further below.

Spatial distancing as a strategy of discomfort

For most asylum-seekers, alongside the temporal indeterminacy that reporting constitutes, faced the additional challenge of accessing the reporting centre itself. I conducted the majority of my fieldwork at Patchway police station, which has been the official reporting centre for Bristol and the surrounding area since 2014, having moved from its previous location at Trinity Road, in the centre of Bristol. Located in South Gloucestershire, Patchway is seven miles from central Bristol, and for the significant majority of people who travel there by bus, requires a 60-90 min journey each way. A common conversation starter when people arrive for their reporting appointment and join the queue is: ‘Did it take you long to get here?’ and, ‘Isn’t it a pain to get here?!’. Not only is the distance from Bristol to Patchway highly inconvenient, the police station itself is also physically awkward to access. The stop at which the bus drops people off is located at the side of a dual carriageway, where people are forced to cross a very busy road when there is a gap in the traffic. The fact that most are required to report every week or every 2 weeks — though for some as often as two to 3 days every single week — enforces this arduous journey on people on a regular basis. Indeed, these difficulties in travelling to reporting appointments are not confined to those required to report at Patchway; the Home Office building in North Shields, situated on the outskirts of Newcastle, was closed in 2015. This resulted in those housed in accommodation in and around Newcastle being required to report in the city of Middlesbrough, an expensive journey taking an hour and 15 minutes and which includes a change in trains (Burridge, 2019).

As Hassan described above, the financial cost for travelling to and from reporting appointments serves as an additional challenge that asylum-seekers face, as many of those required to report are not compensated for their travel expenses. Most travel to the reporting centre by bus or train, a journey which can cost anything from £3 to £12 for a return fare, depending on where in the country they are required to report. This is a huge financial burden, given the regularity with which individuals are required to report, as well as the fact that those awaiting a decision on their asylum claim are not permitted to work, and are excluded from claiming mainstream welfare benefits. Those who have a pending asylum claim are able to apply for Section 95 support in the form of housing and basic living expenses, which currently provides £40.85 a week, around 50% of Job Seekers Allowance, which is itself set just above the poverty line (Mayblin 2017). Asylum-seekers therefore, exist in a state of enforced destitution which, as Coddington et al. (2020) articulate, constitutes a condition of both extreme impoverishment and dependency. As reporting is a condition of bail, asylum-seekers are compelled to prioritise their meagre funds to pay for transportation to and from their reporting appointments, or risk losing their income and housing altogether. Many asylum-seekers in receipt of Section 95 support chose to purchase a weekly bus pass, which can cost up to £25 a week, over half of their weekly income. ⁵ Inevitably, the budgetary constraints placed on asylum-seekers means that the everyday can be a struggle for survival.

The financial burden of this travel expense is, of course, further weighted for those without access to any official source of income whatsoever. Cuthill (2017) notes that there are more than 285,000 destitute asylum seekers living without recourse to public funds in the UK, who end up homeless, and susceptible to ill health and exploitation. As well, recent changes to asylum policy have resulted in significant rises in levels of destitution amongst asylum seekers and those who have recently been granted refugee status, with the Red Cross estimating a further 50,000 people being made homeless by new policy measures. ⁶ Many of the people I met at the reporting centre were destitute and were unable to access any state support, relying on friends and charity for basic survival. This can often be attributed to the fact that they have been unable to prove to the Home Office that they are destitute - a Byzantine administrative process which itself, is wrought with numerous challenges. Those without any access to state support are perceptibly more vulnerable, and become more likely to engage in informal labour. Yet, working in informal employment also perpetuates vulnerability to arrest and detainment as immigration bail is contingent upon the individual complying with the terms of immigration bail, which excludes the right to work.

During my research, I discovered that several people had recently served a prison sentence for working without legal documentation, making them subject to reporting requirements. Farid, a young man, told me that he had recently been released from prison and, like many required to report, was not permitted to work, yet still had to find the money to pay for his bus fare to his reporting appointments. He told me in anguish: “It’s like they want me to commit another crime!”. Indeed, the legal constraints placed on those awaiting an outcome on their immigration case, including those with a conviction history, coupled with the sheer length of time this can take, means that seeking informal employment is for many, their only option for survival (Yeo, 2020). This is propelled by the fact that having a criminal conviction makes it far easier for the Home Office to justify removing individuals, who become deemed as devious and therefore deportable (Pinkowska, 2019). Continually drawing people to these difficult-to-access reporting sites, combined with the physical and financial challenges this entails, confronts many with this double bind, where the exclusion both from access to employment and from any channel to financial support exacerbates their vulnerability to arrest and potential removal. As Mohammed’s story illustrates, the challenge of getting to and from the reporting centre and the financial burden it entails was, for many, one of the main struggles of their everyday lives. A young man from east Africa told me he had to walk to Patchway as he could not afford the bus fare; he shared that once, afraid of missing his appointment, he had even walked the journey through heavy snow. These examples extend notions of how the state imposes ways of moving through space, where romanticised accounts of mobility (Salter, 2013), and walking as a leisure activity (Mason, 2021) become disavowed through this form of enforced mobilisation. As well as the financial challenges for signers posed by the sheer awkwardness in accessing reporting sites is the fact their physical remoteness further compounds their vulnerability to detainment, due to the distance of family, friends or solicitors who may be able to advocate on their behalf.

In sum, the almost unbearable mundane repetivity and patent awkwardness of reporting, suggests the making of an unliveable life (Butler 2006, 2016), which manifests as a state of mere existing (Coddington et al., 2020), representing the necropolitics of being ‘kept alive but in a state of injury’ (Mbembe, 2003:21). As I explore in the following section, these features of reporting, which constitute a banal and surreptitious form of violence are also part of the everyday tactics of intimate control and fear and contribute to the ways in which lives are gradually ground down over time.

Force withheld

Every time I go [to report], I am very full of worry. I wait and I wait; I think they are going to take me (Aimee, asylum-seeker).

The threat of detention and removal is felt continuously for those awaiting an outcome on their asylum claim, and as Aimee’s words demonstrate, cause immense anxiety and fear, particularly at the point of reporting (Burridge, 2019). Here, I focus on how the threat of detention and removal are encountered through reporting sites, which serve as expressions of the physical structures of violence constituting border control regimes. Echoing Graeber’s depiction of the ways in which governments ultimately depend on the threat of physical force, where force ‘is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence’ (2012: 112), I show how a reliance on the imminent threat of force becomes fundamental to the structures of power and control which constitute the reporting process itself.

“It’s like a shadow of control”

As discussed, immigration bail is mobilised as a strategy for cooperation with state authorities and where the possibility of detention and removal is held as a continual threat over asylum-seekers. Pain (2014a; 2014b) draws out this characterisation of violence in her work on domestic abuse, observing the constitutive relationship between physical violence and fear. She describes how fear has the potential to regulate immediate and future behaviour, so that physical force is not always necessary to retain control. In this sense, the fear of the violence of detainment and forced removal does some of the work of actual physical violence.

As Mohammed’s account indicates, the fear of being detained whilst reporting is often experienced bodily in the days and hours proceeding the appointment, materialised through the loss of appetite, sleeplessness, or in nervous bodily actions such as the repeated counting of coins for bus fare. Many individuals also display bodily signs of fear when waiting to report, including not wanting to engage in conversation, biting their fingernails, and on occasion, displaying outbursts of anger. Signing support volunteer Sophy articulated it as such:

It’s like a shadow of control over you at all times. It may be two weeks to wait but it’s still there. Or even six-monthly, it’s still there… You’re insecure, you’re reminded that it’s a hostile system that may send you back to a dangerous place.

The anticipation of detainment and removal functions powerfully to instil fear which, like a shadow, can be both haunting and nebulous. This description evokes how the invocation of fear becomes inscribed on the body, as the signers’ bodies hold intimate knowledge of state powers (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006). The threat of physical force in the form of detainment and removal is conveyed in various ways, including the Home Office informing individuals of an increase in frequency in their reporting requirements. Elodie, an asylum-seeker, told me: “When they start changing your time, be very careful, when they start putting you to every 1 week, every 2 weeks”. While this increase may not always be based on an actual decision to detain (though it often was), the fear it induced in people was immense. Indeed, many interviewees reported feelings of extreme fear and anxiety in the days and hours proceeding their appointments, which, as Elodie’s words reveal, is amplified when an individual has been summoned to report more frequently. Furthermore, the continual threat of detainment and removal is also fundamentally related to being repeatedly made visible to the state. Arendt (1958) argues that, in the same way that one must have the right to appear before others, one must also have the right to non-appearance, or invisibility. Yet by conditioning people’s rights both to asylum support and immigration bail upon their regular attendance at the reporting centre, apprehends their ability to hide or seek invisibility. Without exercising any degree of physical force or injury over individuals - for they enter into the reporting space voluntarily - these techniques render them visible to the state, thus reinstating the self-regulatory power of reporting itself.

Witnessing others

Another way in which the threat of detainment is communicated through reporting is by witnessing others being detained. The location in which signers queue to enter the reporting office, means it is clearly visible when a fellow signer is being detained. In such instances, usually two Border Enforcement guards, wearing flak jackets and adorned with handcuffs and batons, will follow the individual into the reporting office, which locks automatically from the inside, and then escort them to another room for further questioning. When it is deemed the person will be detained, the guards, wearing purple latex gloves, will proceed with a full body search, before escorting them to one of the onsite holding cells where they await transportation to a detention facility. In these instances, the anticipation of violence becomes signalled through the encoded features and accoutrements of the space as well as the guards themselves; from the automatically locking doors, to the purple latex gloves, to the officers handcuffs and batons, these indicators of physical force oftentimes deem actual physical force unnecessary.

In observing the emotional impact that witnessing a detainment had on others attending their reporting appointments, it had an almost universally traumatising effect, which compounded feelings of insecurity and vulnerability within the site. For some, they broke down into tears, while for others, it manifested in outbursts of anger:

I met Sami today, a young man from Iraq... I immediately thought he looked very nervous as he waited in the queue… I asked him if this was his first time reporting. It was, and he shared he had just spent three years in prison and was now facing removal… He waited outside the office looking on edge, wearing tracksuit trousers and oversized headphones; his big muscles betrayed his time in prison. Despite his “tough” looking demeanour, his wide-eyes made him look young and vulnerable. Then the person before him in the queue was led away to one of the interview rooms for questioning, never a good sign, and Sami’s anxiety erupted into anger. “If I get detained today I’m going to hit someone, I’m going to go fucking mental…I can’t get locked up again, I can’t go back in there”, he said. He paced up and down furiously, and it appeared to me like behaviour learnt in prison. Really, he was a young, scared man (Fieldnotes, September 2017).

Observing Sami’s reaction to witnessing another person being led away for questioning, which usually indicates a detainment is due to take place, felt particularly unsettling; I was suddenly afraid that he might now be detained as a result of his response, or that he might now be reluctant to report again, making him more susceptible to removal. He later told me he would continue to attend his appointments, as he was scared of “getting locked up again”. Sami’s encounter reflects how individuals are compelled to continue attending their reporting appointments, for in witnessing others being detained, their own fear is wielded as a productive emotion for compliance and docility.

Everyday terrorism

Asylum-seekers’ accounts of reporting evince how the fear of being detained and removed was experienced beyond the walls of the reporting centre, as Border Enforcement are known to appear at people’s residence to detain them unexpectedly, at times when they suspect they will be at home. Bernadette, an asylum-seeker who lives in asylum supported accommodation, shared:

Even though I have Rule 35, I’m still looking through my window all the time. Between 6 o’clock until 8 o’clock in the morning, that’s what time they normally come. They’ve taken…four people in my house.

‘Having Rule 35’ means a medical practitioner has deemed Bernadette’s health ‘likely to be injuriously affected by’ being detained (Detention Centre Rules 2001). This is intended to protect her from arrest and detainment; however, clearly this assurance is overshadowed by the everyday fear she experiences from within her own home, and which is continually re-embedded by those in her household and community being arrested. Despite the fact that the reporting site is only entered intermittently, the experience of unyielding surveillance was commonly shared, reflecting Foucault’s depiction of the panopticon, as ‘induc[ing] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility, that assures the function of power’ (Foucault, 1995:45). In Foucault’s analysis, the surveillance itself was not necessarily permanent, but became permanent in its effect on the subject; exercising a subtle coercive power which reinforces feelings of subordination (Foucault, 1995), isolation and a loss of agency (Bowstead 2011).

In a similar way, Bernadette’s experiences of looking out of her window every morning reveal how the sense of being monitored seeps into everyday life, reinforcing the notion that the border is everywhere (Coleman 2007). In her theorisation, Pain (2014a) recognises domestic violence as ‘everyday terrorism’, highlighting the centrality of fear and trauma in instilling coercive control, whilst also conflating the boundaries between public/political and private/mundane which normatively frame understandings of violence. In a similar way, by witnessing or anticipating physical force, Bernadette experiences a form of everyday terrorism, which as Pain describes, creates more fear and trauma, ‘because it is more frequent and prolonged, and takes place within the intimate sphere’ (2014a: 540). Bernadette goes on to describe how others in her household were arrested by Border Enforcement:

They went without saying bye… all of them they came to get them from the house. Then, management comes… looks at their clothes to take them and give them to a second-hand shop… they check on what is good and what is bad and the rest they put in a black bag.

Witnessing these arrests from her own home, Bernadette describes their almost haunting effect, where the fear of also being arrested becomes inscribed through everyday sites and objects, as both the people left behind, and their tampered possessions become ‘marked by attacks’ (Pain 2014a: 537). While the reporting centre is a site recognised by asylum-seekers as one of profound insecurity, Bernadette’s words illustrate the continuum of practices linked to reporting through which fear is mobilised, and where the home also becomes a place of danger. Several participants reported feelings of extreme anxiety about being arrested from their own homes, a tactic of fear which, through the continual apprehension of arrest, seeps into the most private of spaces. The repeated experience of witnessing others being detained has a culminative effect, in creating a permanent state of fear.

Expediating removal

In the UK, one of the most patent ways in which the violence of border regimes is revealed is in the administration of deportation or enforced removals. As De Genova and Peutz argue, the act of deportation is premised on a dominant notion of the world in which sovereign nation-states preside over the division between ‘more or less “rightful” members (citizens) and relatively rightless nonmembers (aliens)’ (2010: 7). While efforts to appear nonviolent constitute an integral part of the neoliberal agenda (Springer, 2011), this stands in tension with profound attempts to ‘digitise, trace and exclude uninvited migrants’ (Hyndman, 2012: 245).

It had been a typical morning volunteering at Patchway reporting centre when I witnessed my first detainment. Hazrat, a slender 18-year-old, originally from Afghanistan, presented at the reporting centre with his housing support officer. He had arrived in the UK as a young teenager and shortly before his eighteenth birthday, had received notice from the Home Office that he was to begin regular reporting. On this particular day, I watched as he was led away by two Border Enforcement guards through the double doors, to the onsite holding cells. Later that day, he was driven to an immigration detention facility and I eventually learnt that, after spending over 3 months in detention, he was removed back to Afghanistan. In reflecting on the role that reporting plays in expediating the removal process, it becomes possible to connect how these sites are part and parcel of the geopolitics of exclusionary bordering practices, and play a key strategic role in the state’s attempt to ‘contain’ migrants, and ‘prevent them from seeking asylum’ (Hyndman, 2012: 243). Furthermore, in these displays of force, what is less perceptible is how the continuum of violence stretches beyond the confines of the UK border; reports of the Home Office forcibly removing former child asylum-seekers back to Afghanistan when they turned 18, where they face innumerable hardships and where some have been killed, has been well documented (see Lyons, 2018). Several asylum-seekers I met during fieldwork had experienced torture before arriving in the UK, and had a very real fear of being killed if returned to their country of origin. Felix, an asylum-seeker, was one of the most visibly vulnerable participants I encountered during my research. He told me about his involvement with a political party that had been critical of his country’s government and how the president of this party had been assassinated by government forces. Felix had managed to flee to the UK, and yet months later was detained during his reporting appointment. He recounted his experience of an attempted removal:

If they deport me, the first problem is they will arrest me because I have many problems there. My name is on the list, yes. And other people just looking will try and arrest me… [The Home Office] give me the ticket for the plane, and you know the day when you go, there’s someone who tell you the plane is ready. I go Saturday, one o’clock… There are planes flying… you’re like, ok the next one is mine. It’s putting you in a mental pressure, very stressful.

Remarkably, Felix’s solicitor managed to prevent his removal hours before he was due to be forcibly removed, and months after I interviewed Felix, I discovered he had received indefinite leave to remain.

While reporting sites are, for the most part, one step removed from displays of physical force, these accounts testify to the crucial administrative role they play in facilitating the violent tasks of detainment and removal, as well as the potential for further violence and even death when migrants are returned.

Conclusion

Border control and management practices administrate a plethora of violences over individuals, which operate through a continuum. While in critical geopolitics, a conventional understanding of space and scale has hierarchised and separated out different forms and sites of violence, framing the violence of border regimes through a feminist lens, reclaims the experiential, the everyday and the embodied accounts of asylum-seeking as implicit within global political processes. By focusing on the under-researched site and practice of immigration reporting, I have traced the interconnected ways in which state violence is enacted and embodied through border bureaucracies, which is at once both intimate and global. The accounts of immigration reporting in this paper, reveal the entanglement and indivisibility of different forms of violence these sites perform, highlighting how the mundane, bureaucratic, and seemingly benign features of reporting, are part of the same continuum which constitutes the violence of enforced removals. Recognising the ways in which migrant dependency and destitution are integral to systems of control and removal, and implicating reporting in expediating these seemingly disparate processes, engenders the violent continuum to which asylum-seekers become subject. Often diffused across time and place, these different forms and sites of violence are put to work upon migrant bodies in intimate ways, and are integral to global systems of exclusionary border control regimes.

In emphasising the inherent interconnectedness of different forms of violence operating through border enforcement practices, opens up new questions for research on the geographies of asylum and exclusion, border bureaucracies and their practices, and the interplay between the global-intimate more broadly. As the UK positions the exclusion of asylum-seekers at the forefront of its politics, greater attention is needed in understanding the embodied, and the intimate ways in which violence is performed through these systems. This attention to Home Office reporting specifically and how it functions within the broader context of the UK’s border regime, provides a critical lens for understanding the often concealed ways in which state violence is both imposed and obscured. Beyond border control practices, this framing contributes to broader rethinking of other intimate manifestations of violence and how they are tethered to the foundational logics of sovereign state politics. As Springer (2011) writes, liberal democratic states are invested in erasing the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs. By rendering visible these violent continuums, elucidates the constitutive interplay between the intimate and the global, thereby forging the way for more accountability within and towards our political structures and systems.