Inside the Bureaucracy of Immigration Detention Disgust, Contempt, and Humiliation

Introduction, 1. The Meanings and Functions of Immigration Detention 2. Investigating Immigration Detention 3. Bureaucratic Subjectivities in the Era of Migration Immunology 4. Feminisation of Bureaucracies 5. Immigration Detention: the Rules of the Field and the Rite of Institution 6. Immigration Detention as a Social Prophylaxis Mechanism, Conclusions

Biography

Alethia Fernández de la Reguera is a Departmental Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Oxford. Her research examines border militarisation, immigration detention, gender, bureaucracies, and migration from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Inside the Bureaucracy of Immigration Detention offers a meticulously researched and richly theorized ethnography of everyday power relations within the immigration detention bureaucracy. Through a feminist lens attentive to intersectional discrimination, Fernández de la Reguera interlaces the narratives of migrant women with those of low-level bureaucrats, demonstrating how these officials’ subjectivities undergird the coercive power of the state. Insightful, original, and highly accessible—an essential, compelling read.

Cecilia Menjívar, Distinguished Professor, Director, Center for the Study of International Migration University of California, Los Angeles

This engaging and wide-ranging account of immigration detention practices in Mexico shows us the effect of this form of custody on staff and people who are detained.  Drawing on multiple years of research, it offers sustained evidence of the negative impacts of border control for individuals and the wider society. In so doing, it demands, an alternative. A moving book that adds an important  geographical focus to a field that until now has largely focused on the US, Australia and Europe.

Mary Bosworth, Professor, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford

In this rigorous volume, grounded in extensive ethnographic research, Fernández de la Reguera reveals the mechanisms through which the Mexican state—acting through its agents and local institutions—deploys dehumanization and persistent humiliation as an “effective” means of controlling migrants under its custody. A challenging yet indispensable contribution.

Marina Ariza, Professor, Institute of Social Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico

This book sheds critical light on the lived experiences of incarcerated migrants in Mexico: one of the largest immigration detention systems globally. Providing rich empirical detail as well as important conceptual and methodological insights from a perspective rooted in the Global South, Alethia Fernández de la Reguera convincingly documents the central role that bureaucrats play in sustaining the power and violence of a gendered and racialised regime whereby punishment and disgust prevail. A must-read for scholars seeking to understand the social and affective dimensions of the detention centre as a ‘total institution’.

Vicki Squire, Professor,  Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick