Making Populations for Deportation: Bureaucratic Knowledge Practices Inside a European Deportation Unit

Abstract

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 schol-arship on street-level bureaucrats and the materiality of paperwork, it traces how depor-tation 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 gen-dered. 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.