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This article explores how people are made deportable through bureaucratic practices within European migration infrastructures. Drawing on months of ethnographic fieldwork in a deportation unit, the article focuses on the daily work of file practices. Bridging scholarship on street‐level bureaucrats and the materiality of paperwork, it traces how deportation files move along procedural trajectories, among case workers, databases, police, whiteboards, quota, subunits, embassies, and airlines. This shows how the relations gathered in file practices mobilize categories of populations, for example racialized or gendered. The research elaborates that the deportable subject is formed in a constellation of various populations, paradoxically given the legal call to individualize all deportees. Moreover, the populations themselves need to be made in file practices, too, unfolding a dual bureaucratic knowledge practice that shows the populations that are demarcated by state deportations to be intrinsically situated. [deportation, bureaucracy, file practices, population, Europe]

Indifference has long been acknowledged as a crucial affect to the continuation of bureaucratic practices. Recently, the production of more diverse and layered affective modes in bureaucratic institutions is increasingly highlighted. However, how affects differ within and between sites saturated with ‘paper work’ remains an understudied terrain. In this paper we focus on the relations that are formed in daily file-work within two state institutions: a Deportation Unit and a Criminal Court. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork in order to show that a) affects are locally produced in the relations that are mobilized in file-work b) these affects are unevenly produced within and between different bureaucratic practices. By comparing two different bureaucratic settings yet related in the subjugation they demand of the bureaucratic referent of their practices, we aim to put forward how differences in bureaucratic practice come with their own specific affective modes, showing that bureaucratic practices are saturated in, and thrive on, diverse affects of varying intensity. Bureaucratic action is a deeply affective practice, within which the relationship between caseworker, casefile, and the file’s referent is carefully calibrated. With this intervention we position ourselves within scholarship that complicates perceived dichotomies between rationality, still often associated with bureaucracy, and affect. Developing sensitivities towards such variety of bureaucratic affect offers nuanced perspectives on file-work and what kind of sovereign power the relations that are made through file-work subsequently allow to be reproduced.