Making deportable people Bureaucratic knowledge practices in European deportation sites

How are deportable people made? This is the empirical question that is explored in this dissertation. The observations shared are based on years of ethnographic research on deportation practices in locations ranging from civil society spaces, to squats housing illegalized people, to securitized interstate meetings. The main fieldwork site, however, is a European Deportation Unit where daily work is centered around deportation files. On the inside, the author attended to file-work from the moment of people’s arrest to their ‘removal’. The outlook of file trajectories therein is to eventually document a ‘perfectly illegal and removable’ file referent: the deportee.
Through being embedded in deportation bureaucracy as an ethnographer, it became clear that the relations that are formed in these file practices — between case workers, databases, embassies, social workers, quotas, lawyers, and more — constantly change as ‘files-for-removal’ move along procedural trajectories. These contingent interactions that are (de)mobilized in file practices collectively shape the deportee as a situated bureaucratic subject. Focusing on the deportable subject, a figure who can only be known by constantly being made, offers reflections that lie at the intersection of borders, nations, population and state power. What does the knowledge that is created in deportation bureaucracy tell us about our shared, social lives? As this work shows, despite deportation practices taking place mostly behind closed doors, we are all intricately bound up by them.