‘They know the procedure; they just don’t know when we will come’: uncovering the practice of unannounced deportations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Migration control and its enforcement represent a specific policy field, defined by the state’s authorisation to use coercive regulation against migrants with precarious legal status, including forceful deportation. While the analysis of deportation as a ‘technology of citizenship’ has been developed historically, politically and, from the perspective of migrants, this work advances an ethnographic study of migration enforcement agencies in Switzerland, Germany and Sweden with a focus on street-level understandings of unannounced deportation procedures. As argued, unannounced deportations are at the very end of the coercive continuum, used to increase the deportability of migrant individuals or rather their ‘willingness’. The analysed data advances three particular street-level understandings regarding the use of the practice: First, state agents understand unannounced deportations as caused by the migrants’ alleged noncompliant behaviour, underlining migrants’ responsibility for bringing the procedure upon themselves and therefore allowing bureaucrats to use force. Second, agents understand their work as humane, using the nondisclosure of removal dates as a practice that keeps respective deportees ‘safe’. Thirdly, an underlying pragmatism exists, based on the need to implement ‘law and order’, with a disruptive effect for migrant individuals. States thus construct boundaries of belonging through deportation, legitimised by state agents’ reflections.