A Mundane Spectacle? (In)visibility, Normalisation and State Power in the UK's Migrant Escorting Contract

This chapter analyses how deportation works in practice in the UK. Drawing on first-hand ethnographic observations of deportations and conversations with staff charged with removing foreign nationals from prisons and immigration removal centres, it sketches out the process in its entirety. By illuminating the sheer variety of private sector involvement, from the food provided in the vans to the airport, to the security companies who protect the deportation agents on the ground in Kabul, Mogadishu, and Baghdad, this chapter seeks to widen our understanding of the nature, scale, and implications of outsourcing border control. As we will show, the messy, everyday, nature of deportation is often hard to explain or understand, and the impact of its privatisation is not straightforward. Despite contracting out much of the logistics of enforced removal, the state remains present in the figure of the border force agent or immigration enforcement officer at the port, in the immigration officer on a charter flight, and in the human rights monitors who scrutinise all stages of the process. It is also the state that authorises, cancels, and delays movements.