Inside the Bureaucracy of Immigration Detention: Disgust, Contempt and Humiliation (Routledge Studies in Criminal Justice, Borders and Citizenship)

This book examines the implementation of immigration policy in Mexico through an ethnographic and relational lens, focusing on the subjectivities of state officials.Based on three years of qualitative research (2017-2019) conducted at the Siglo XXI Migration Station in Tapachula, Chiapas-Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala-the study explores how agents of the National Institute of Migration (INM) experience, interpret, and enact state power at the local level.The analysis foregrounds the subjective dimensions of bureaucratic work-emotions, fears, desires, and forms of reasoning-and their direct impact on migrants’ experiences of detention and deprivation of liberty. Central to the book is an examination of the institutional processes of subjection that produce subjects in immigration detention.Approaching immigration policy as a political, cultural, and social practice embedded in everyday institutional life, the study shows how state institutions are sustained not only through leg