#border studies

Tulane University Stone Center and the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship 2026-27 Deadline: Unstated; posted on Tulane site 7/29 Length/Track: One year with the possibility of renewal Description:...

Bowdoin College Assistant/Associate Professorship in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies Deadline: September 10 (review begins) Length/Track: Tenured, tenure track Description: Inviting "applications for a full-time tenure-track faculty appointment in…...

EL PASO, Texas | Border agents face split-second decisions on use of force

EL PASO, Texas | Clash with migrants spotlights force at the border

Under British criminal law, it is not permissible to detain a person indefinitely. In normal circumstances the maximum period a person can be detained without charge is 24 hours, rising to 96 hours (four days), ‘if a serious crime is suspected.’ The only exception to these limits relates to persons suspected of terrorism, who, under special powers granted by the 2006 Terrorism Act could be detained for up to 28 days.This length of time was fiercely contested at the point of its introduction and the temporary powers granting it were allowed to lapse in 2011, the period of detention reverting to its pre-2006 limit of 14 days. The significance of these periods lies in the sense of a limit, a limit that relates to the question of sovereignty and that ties the question of sovereignty to the issue of time. The question cuts both ways. Sovereign law establishes its ethical character by the degree to which it encroaches on, and also protects, the sovereign actions of the individual citizen. Currently one key measure of that relationship in the UK is the period of 14 days, being the point beyond which the interests of the individual cannot be overridden by the interests of the state. Unless, that is, the individual is held in immigration detention. This begs the question: how is the institution of the removal centre legal? Or rather, since in conventional terms, it plainly offends legal principles, what relation does such a site have to the law? The answer is that it seems to stand just outside: subject to the law’s authority but not governed by its defining protections; a setting where different rules of sovereignty and temporality apply.

In theory, typically at least, a person is held in immigration detention at the point at which they are imminently to be removed from the UK. This arrangement, which is to say the detention, is temporary, but it is also indefinite. The consequence is that a person who is not at that point charged with any crime can be detained for months or years, pending their removal. At the recently closed Dover Immigration Removal Centre, for example, the longest period of detention was over four years.… Following that period of indefinite detention, some people, less than half as it turns out, will actually be removed. The others, for whatever reason, often to do with the impossibility of securing travel documents, will be ‘released’ back into the community. Once released some will be accommodated in Section 4 bail accommodation, which the conditions of their bail will specify they have to return to every night (a requirement sometimes reinforced by an electronic tag). Since people who have been detained, former detainees, can’t work, they receive a form of relief paid not in cash but in the form of vouchers called an Azure card; a form of top-up card that can only be used in certain shops or supermarkets and which (as the British Red Cross reported in 2014) carries certain restrictions including, crucially, the fact that it can’t be spent on public transport.… The restriction on public transport … is among the most material effects, one consequence being that when they have to report at a Home Office Reporting Centre (on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis, depending on the conditions of their release from detention) many former detainees will have to walk long distances just to make the report. The more general effect, however, is to fix a person in a given location, often for months and years on end (over a decade is not at all uncommon). Except that with that stasis—again, part of the lexicon of detention—comes the risk that at any point they might be ‘dispersed’ (relocated to another part of the country), or re-detained (which is common). The result of all of the above is that ex-detainees (who are frequently so-called failed asylum seekers, but who might sometimes, perhaps years later, secure refugee status) have a deeply compromised relation to public space.