Resisting the border spectacle 

Post by Mary Bosworth, Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford. Mary can be found @mfbosworth.bsky.social 

On 11 February 2025, the UK Home Office released a short video entitled ‘We’re removing migrants with no right to be here’.  Set to a threatening soundrack, the film shows men being walked up a covered stairway onto the back of a plane at night. They are surrounded by uniformed staff in high vis jackets. Most disembark a coach; a smaller sum exit a minivan. There is no indication of who is doing the work other than a brief glimpse of ‘Immigration Enforcement’ emblazoned on someone’s back. Everyone seems to be male. 

The format of the Home Office video owes much to footage created by the US government who provide hundreds of this kind of film on the ‘defense visual information distribution service’ website. There we also see faceless, nameless people forced onto planes; often they are searched beforehand. Their numbers include women and small children, men in casual clothes, and people in white jump suits, who are in chains. In both cases, security staff stand around. The movies always end with the plane taking off. Job done.  

While there is a growing body of academic literature on the consequences of deportation, other than occasional reports by HM Inspectorate of Prisons ‘escort and removals’ team, we know little of the process of this form of border control. Most charter flights occur in the dead of night and access to them is tightly controlled. While considerable activism surrounds some, publicising their occurrence and seeking to disrupt, most occur without a hitch. 

From 2019 – 2023, I observed a number of these boardings as part of my research into the UK’s immigration detainee escorting system, currently operated by Mitie.  When the project began, the UK had not yet fully exited the European Union, and so the first few I attended were those returning ‘third country nationals’ to Europe. These flights, codenamed ‘Esparto’, were the most violent I saw. Many of those on them were desperate to stay.   

My fieldnotes, taken at Stansted Airport in November 2019 offer a glimpse into what it was like. 

“I could not really see the face of the first man in the crowd of staff around him who rushed him up the steep back stairs in a V-shape. I followed more slowly. 

This man was very upset. He kept yelling over and over in Arabic. When I asked one of the managers what he was saying and why an interpreter was not present, she was blunt: ‘It doesn’t matter what he’s saying. He’s going. This is our plane.’ Although he had boarded the bus freely at the detention centre, by now this man was in a waist restraint belt. 

Next up, an Eritrean man I remembered from the collection point at Harmondsworth, was brought in. He was struggling and crying as he walked on board. When he was forced into a seat he kept sobbing and thrashing around. The three Mitie staff struggled to control his movements. He kept trying to bang his head on the seat in front. When the ‘head control’ agent could not stop him, one of the other detainee custody officers leant over, and grabbed the man’s head like a rugby ball. He put his face right up against it, speaking into his ear. I wonder what he said. 

Later I heard the agents urging him to calm down. I think they said ‘Be a man’. ‘Be strong.’ 

At this point of the proceedings, 4 men were on board, 2 of whom were restrained; one yelling, the other crying. 

Then the four from Colnbrook were brought up. They were all physically bound. One was carried on in waist and leg restraints. This man remained silent, saying nothing. 

The final passenger, from Kosovo, who had allegedly resisted three other attempts to remove him was frogmarched on board in a waist restraint belt. This time he had agreed to go.” 

Nearly two years later, a few weeks before Christmas 2021, I observed the boarding of a flight to Vilnius, Lithuania, under the codename ‘Operation Solidago’. By this point, I knew what to expect. It would be a long, exhausting night overshadowed by the possibility of violence, and punctuated by moments of actual use of force. I reached the Operational Control Centre near Gatwick around 10.30 p.m. The first task was to take a Lateral Flow test: this was a ‘tested flight’, during the active phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rules were in flux at the national and international levels. While some countries insisted the UK could only return COVID-free citizens to them, others waived this requirement, putting everyone in quarantine instead.  

As soon as I arrived, I was told that the number of people being removed had more than halved, twenty-three to ten, due to a COVID-19 outbreak in a section of Brook House. A handful of men who were detained elsewhere in the same institution were still due to fly. 

One was highlighted as being particularly vulnerable. He had a history of ‘mental issues’, staff said. He was on antipsychotic medication and required a sleep apnea machine. He was also taking methadone to manage a heroin addiction. When some officers raised concerns about his inclusion, they were reassured: a paramedic from Aeromed had already visited him in detention and had determined that he was ‘fit to fly’. 

Eventually, after hours of waiting, the muster began. Everyone was asked to turn off their phones. First a roll call, then workers were allocated to buses or the ‘chaser vans’, set aside for those who resist their removal. A senior staff member ran through a list of rules: no phones, dress code, don’t fall asleep. He repeatedly stressed the importance of accurately completing the PERs (Person Escorting Records), and of making sure all interactions with detainees were recorded. 

The people they were escorting were no longer to be referred to as ‘detainees’, he told them, but as ‘residents’. The Home Office had issued a new policy. The ‘residents’, he went on, ‘must also be addressed by their name and not their manifest number’.  

I went on the coach to Brook House where they were collecting five men, all of whom had recently been released from prison. In notable contrast to the Esparto charter in 2019, officers talked at length to them, at least to those who spoke English. They allowed one man to have a cigarette and another to take his one-litre bottle of Coke on board the coach.  

Serco reception staff in the IRC offered everyone a new warm jacket, beanie and gloves. It was going to be cold in Vilnius, they warned them. Not everyone had a place to live, but only one man accepted their offer. It was unclear why. Meanwhile, the escorts joked about the opportunity they would soon have for sex after their enforced celibacy in prison. Nobody was physically restrained; in fact, the team leader did not bring the waist restraint belt into the IRC. ‘I have handcuffs,’ he pointed out, ‘and I know how to use them. But I prefer to talk to them.’ 

When we finally arrived at Birmingham XLR airport, we sat in the carpark for some hours. Staff were allowed to disembark for a cigarette. The men were not.  Eventually, the coaches drove onto the airfield, next to the plane.  The men, who were rushed up the stairs, had to step up over a gap at the top, pushed by from behind, pulled from above. 

The violence that night was of a different kind, less dramatic, but in its indifference painful and distressing nonetheless to witness, and, no doubt, to endure: the rushed processes, whereby people were hustled from one site of custody to another. The mentally unwell man who had worried some officers at the briefing was bundled on board, despite clearly being confused about what was happening or where he was going.  

What can we learn from these kinds of description? And how at all does it colour our view of the Home Office footage? 

While critics were rightfully outraged at the film, pointing to its dehumanising effects, there are other issues which may be less visible. The official films sanitise the process, leaving out the tedium, the resistance, the chaos, the sorrow, the fear. They overstate the power of the state and its private operatives. Nothing ever fully goes according to plan. And it doesn’t have to. 

Thanks to Patrice Petit we have regular charter flight figures obtained via FOIs. The most recent, from Q3 2024, reminds us of the relative modesty of this system. With one exception, the numbers removed on each plane range from 30 – 50 people placed on aircrafts that can carry over 200. Twelve of the 16 flights went to Albania. The total figures removed are distorted by one trip to Brazil, which was clearly not the same kind of enforcement. It included women and children, and for a total of 223 people on board, only 6 ‘escorts’. In previous quarters, similar flights to Brazil have had no escorts at all. By comparison, most others are staffed around 2:1. For the one flight to Pakistan on December 10, 2024, there were almost 3 officers per person being removed. 

While these numbers are certainly higher than they were during my research, when it was common for planes to take off with fewer than 10 people on board, almost always surrounded by three-times that many staff or more, they are still far from most people’s understanding of ‘mass deportation’. That does not make them any less significant for those subject to them, but it does point to other questions we might ask about them.   

The danger of taking the Home Office too literally in its discursive or visual accounts, is that we fail to hold up to scrutiny the levels of financial investment in this system.  While Labour could end the human and economic waste of this kind of expenditure, their recent announcement of a new contract for more removal work, suggests a lack of new ideas. This decision also highlights an apparent failure, or perhaps refusal, to understand how this business destroys not just the lives of those subject to it, but, as we saw in the summer race riots, undermines wider social cohesion in the UK. 

The border spectacle, as De Genova famously wrote, keeps ‘migrants’ working ‘hard’ and ‘scared’. What is perhaps less commonly considered, is the effect of the same forces on those who enforce the border and, by extension, the community in which they live.  In my study of the private escorts – I saw many effects on their mental health, wellbeing, family life and opportunities. On a staff survey administered at the end of the project, one in eight (12.6%)  reported thoughts of suicide over the past week.  The point is not to prioritise them over the people they detain and deport, but rather to reveal the links between these two groups, both of whom are diminished by these policies and practices. For only in connecting them, I think, might we plant the seeds for an alternative approach—one that reimagines and replaces exclusionary infrastructure with new sites and practices rooted in shared aspirations and inclusion. 

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