Living the spectre of forced return: negotiating deportability in British immigration detention

Abstract

Immigration detention and deportation are being increasingly utilised in many countries as key state responses to irregular migration. These practices work together to force migrants to their countries of origin or third countries, offering limited choice about whether to stay or leave. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic study of British immigration detention, this paper explores how detainees negotiate deportability and their accounts of the spectre of departing the United Kingdom, often against their wishes and occasionally by force. It analyses how deportability and the institutional structures and logics of immigration detention coalesce to shape detainees’ understandings of their positions and options as deportable subjects. The paper highlights the materiality of return from immigration detention and the complexities and multiplicities of how detainees account for their possible departures in relation to the themes of identity, belonging, and home. British immigration removal centres can be understood as ‘sites of struggle’ in which those subject to detention and deportation negotiate these interconnected practices, acting as best they can within coercive and isolating carceral institutions.

Feeling difference: Race, migration, and the affective infrastructure of a Danish detention camp

“…I have not accounted for detained persons’ emotions, how they experience and cope with incarceration, and how they might contest and challenge the affects that detention attaches onto their bodies, and the dis junctions that their contestations can produce in the racial border control regime, within and beyond detention camps. This work has, and is, continuously being done by scholars, activists, and formerly detained persons (see Boochani, 2018; Esposito et al, 2020; Turnbull, 2019). Taken together, however, these different perspectives demonstrate how racism and social and corporal harm are reproduced in detention camps and other bordering sites, dehumanising not only the people incarcerated, but also those incarcerating, and the society that incarcerates and expels.…”

“…These harms are facilitated through and amplified by, racial devaluing processes, which make their suffering acceptable – in some cases, even desirable – to the public (Bhatia, 2020). Moreover, they have demonstrated how people challenge and reconfigure detention power (Esposito et al, 2020; Turnbull, 2019). This article focuses on the emotions set in motion and circulating among detention officials, and the role they play in producing and sustaining the racial difference that justifies detained people's exclusion and expulsion (see Bosworth, 2018; Hall, 2010, 2016).…”

The absent presence of the deportation apparatus: methodological challenges in the production of knowledge on immigration detention

“…Due to the difficulties in accessing detention facilities, research on immigration detention – the administrative deprivation of liberty as a pre‐emptive security measure for the enforcement of immigration decisions – usually draws on limited empirical data or secondary sources and retrospective accounts (Esposito 2017; Turnbull 2019). According to Bosworth, ‘Only by going inside can we try to make better sense of IRCs [immigration removal centres].…”

“…Griffiths 2014; Lietaert et al 2015; Puthoopparambil et al 2015; Turnbull 2016). Occasionally, scholars have brought up dramatic events, such as suicide (Khosravi 2009) or self‐mutilation (Fischer 2015), whereas others have addressed detainees’ negotiations with the deportation apparatus (Campesi 2015; Leekers and Kox 2017; Turnbull 2019). While empirical research predominantly draws on individual testimonies, often little information is provided about the logic of case selection or the representativeness of the data within a highly complex institution, where detainees’ immigration cases can vary from unauthorised entry to rejected asylum applications, and from deportable offences to irregular residency.…”

The Uses and Limits of Photovoice in Research on Life After Immigration Detention and Deportation

“…The first phase was a multi-sited ethnography of four IRCs (Campsfield House, Yarl's Wood, Colnbrook, and Dover) between September 2013 and August 2014 with the aim to understand daily life in these detention centres. This ethnography included observation and interaction, along with formal interviews and focus groups with detainees as well as formal interviews with IRC staff (see Turnbull, 2016Turnbull, , 2017Turnbull, , 2018aTurnbull & Hasselberg, 2017). I also administered the Measuring the Quality of Life in Immigration Detention (MQLD) survey across the four field sites (see Bosworth & Kellezi, 2015).…”