From the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the apprehension and detention of Rumeysa Oztürk, recent actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) exemplify the awesome violence of return. This intervention seeks to foreground that violence in every aspect of these inquiries around repatriation, deportation, and migrants’ humanity. Starting from a migrant-centered perspective demands as much. Repatriation and deportation occur within global structural conditions of inequality that pose deep challenges to efforts to label either as voluntary or humane.[3] This short essay walks through the obstacles to ensuring migrant autonomy in repatriation efforts and offers alternatives to deportation that prioritize human mobility over state sovereignty.
Can repatriation be voluntary?
Given the structural inequality of global economic systems, locating repatriation in migrant autonomy is a challenging task. For many migrants, colonial legacies and neoliberal interventions have foreclosed the ability to pursue a meaningful existence in their country of origin, pushing life necessities such as quality education for their children out of reach. In the United States, the failure of Congress to create lawful pathways for migrants seeking to meet labor demands and protect themselves from serious harm has created precarious conditions for the undocumented. The voluminous literature on voluntary repatriation in the context of refugees offers a warning that, “Once the solution of voluntary repatriation is presented as the humane solution, it generates undue pressure to pursue it even when it is relatively inappropriate; an idealised image of the ultimate solution legitimises a degree of coercion since it is perceived as a solution which the [migrants] should themselves desire most.”
In order to foreground migrant autonomy, repatriation efforts should center questions of safety, dignity, integration and consent. Migrants’ physical and psychological safety is at risk throughout the return process. Even in the best-case scenario, long-term residents must endure the loss of community and loved ones as well as vulnerability in the journey. A focus on safety risks overlooking questions of dignity, which might manifest as the power to make choices about the return process or as the right to be treated with respect in a system that often denigrates migrants. Careful attention must be paid to the challenges of return, as migrants may face social stigma and isolation, in addition to the challenge of reconstructing their lives in their country of origin.[8] Questions of consent must be front and center, with systems designed to identify and dismantle coercion throughout every step of the process.
Can Deportation Be Humane?
In the immigration system as it currently exists in the United States, deportation is inhumane. In the absence of “a legal scheme that allows for realistic, sensible pathways to comport one’s conduct with the law,” deportation is an instrument of violence. Angélica Cházaro explains that the immigration system constructs deportability, a precarious status faced even by migrants who are never deported. Anja Bossow argues that, for long-term residents, deportation itself constitutes torture. Situating deportation in the context of exile, forcible transportation of indentured laborers and enslaved peoples, and population transfer, William Walters makes the case that, “Perhaps the contemporary deportation of aliens is invested with former practices and historical memories in such a way that it can never be merely the deportation of aliens.”
These critiques suggest at least three potential paths forward which might be combined in different constellations. In an entirely different immigration system, one might imagine a more humane approach to deportation. That would require a radical alteration of current laws governing who can enter and remain in the United States lawfully, creating lawful pathways for migrants who fill labor needs and seek to reunite with family members. It would demand a major overhaul of the removal adjudication process, creating a professionalized system that upholds basic standards of due process. It would necessitate an entirely new set of enforcement practices that begin from respect for the migrant and are structured to eliminate violence. Peter Markowitz suggests that government officials might create cooperative programs that encourage migrants to comply with immigration law through education and outreach. Moreover, he notes that deportation is a binary punishment for violation of the immigration laws and argues for a spectrum of different enforcement mechanisms short of removal.
Another approach would emphasize human mobility, seeking to minimize deportability of the vast majority of migrants. In her work on repatriation of refugees, Katy Long offers a transnational mobility approach that might involve residence in both the country of origin and the destination country. In practice, we can see the benefits of this type of framework through regional free movement of people regimes, particularly in Europe and Latin America.These legal arrangements enable human mobility by untethering the ability to cross borders from a justification for that movement. In other words, migrants can enter a new country within the regional arrangement for any reason, and need simply to pass an identification process that confirms that they are who they claim to be, as well as any necessary background checks. Endowed with the autonomy to move lawfully between their country of origin and other countries where they might seek work, education, and/or community, migrants can construct stable lives and contribute to multiple nations.
Finally, the structural conditions in countries of origin must be addressed through investments that prioritize creating infrastructures that enable their citizens to thrive. Ragini Shah suggests that radical alteration of economic priorities in home countries is in order. She argues that, in order to enable migrants to make autonomous decisions about mobility, countries of origin such as Mexico must be supported in efforts to invest in local infrastructure, support agriculture through subsidies, and develop functioning education systems. These are also the preconditions for dignified return.
In a radically different immigration system, where all humans can maintain dignity in movement, and structural conditions in countries of origin ensure that mobility is an autonomous choice, we might begin to debate the availability of humane approaches to deportation. But in the current moment, we see instead fathers with lawful protections against removal who are caregivers to and financial supporters of their disabled child deported to a high-security prison in El Salvador infamous for brutal abuse of inmates. We see instead students exercising their First Amendment rights to dissent apprehended on the street and detained with an eye to deportation. In the current system and structural conditions, deportation is violence.