This chapter analyses how deportation works in practice in the UK. Drawing on first-hand ethnographic observations of deportations and conversations with staff charged with removing foreign nationals from prisons and immigration removal centres, it sketches out the process in its entirety. By illuminating the sheer variety of private sector involvement, from the food provided in the vans to the airport, to the security companies who protect the deportation agents on the ground in Kabul, Mogadishu, and Baghdad, this chapter seeks to widen our understanding of the nature, scale, and implications of outsourcing border control. As we will show, the messy, everyday, nature of deportation is often hard to explain or understand, and the impact of its privatisation is not straightforward. Despite contracting out much of the logistics of enforced removal, the state remains present in the figure of the border force agent or immigration enforcement officer at the port, in the immigration officer on a charter flight, and in the human rights monitors who scrutinise all stages of the process. It is also the state that authorises, cancels, and delays movements.

This article seeks to expand debates about Southernising border criminology to include an ontological dimension. In the context of increasingly technological border control practices, critical analysis of the global circuits of mobility control requires explicit theorisation of the ontological status of humans vis-a-vis their material environment. Such theorisation can also imbue border criminology scholarship with a radical democratic openness to Southern worldviews by destabilising traditional Northern forms of knowledge production about borders and migration. To this end, I synthesise insights from the framework of performativity and the philosophical tradition of pragmatism to propose a framework for analysing the deployment of novel border control technologies in the Global South. The resultant framework challenges state-centric and Northern-centric perspectives on crimmigration control by foregrounding Southern agency and explicitly challenging technicist framings of border control technologies that represent these tools as neutral technical components within a broader global system of state-based ‘migration management’.