Deportations, race and policing in southern Germany

Blog post by Aino Korvensyrjä, University of Helsinki

In the first week of May 2018, there was some moral panic in the German media. National and regional media reported on a ‘mob’ of 150–200 black Africans violently stopping deportation and attacking the enforcement patrol in a reception centre for asylum seekers in Ellwangen, Baden-Württemberg. After the 2015 ‘Summer of Migration’, when popular sympathies for refugee-migrants had peaked in Germany, such narratives of dangerous black and brown refugee-migrant men were a standard feature in the German media and public debate. This continuous panic created public acceptance of deportations of asylum seekers and the increasingly ruthless control policies at external EU borders.
 
My Identities article, ‘Criminalizing black solidarity: Dublin deportations, raids, and racial statecraft in southern Germany’, looks beyond the media and policy debate on ‘Ellwangen’. It examines how the police and courts managed local conflicts over deportation during an intense campaign to increase so-called Dublin deportations. These are deportations to the first country of entry in Europe. For the authorities, a fingerprint registered into the EURODAC database by another European country is enough to begin the deportation proceedings. West Africans were then a key target group of Dublin deportations, and Italy was the main country of destination. The article draws attention to a series of police raids targeting West African migrants living in southern German asylum camps in 2018, including the above-mentioned raid in Ellwangen. In all cases, police accused West African men of rioting against deportation enforcement to Italy, and local courts prosecuted numerous individuals. My article explores how the police and local courts thus suppressed anti-deportation protests and how their practices produced race.

Local conflicts over deportation
 
The first raid occurred in the Bavarian Donauwörth in March 2018, where the police took 30 Gambian men to pre-trial detention, later found guilty of breaching the peace. The operation in Ellwangen occurred some months later. Three days after the media reported that a black ‘mob’ hindered immigration law enforcement ‘with violence’, about 500 officers, including heavily armed riot units, raided the centre starting at 5 a.m. The police claimed to have indications that the centre’s residents were arming themselves to resist deportations. The charges and convictions in this case were unrelated to the original ‘riot’, and the police published no concrete description of the violence against the deportation enforcement patrol. Yet policymakers and journalists alike expressed their outrage at the ‘violent’ migrants. The pictures of young black men handcuffed and accompanied by masked police were used to pass yet another law that facilitated deportations – the 2019 Orderly Return Act.  Similar operations against West Africans were also conducted in Donaueschingen (Baden-Württemberg) and Deggendorf (Bavaria) in the same spring and finally, in October 2018, in the Bavarian Stephansposching in which 400 riot police officers participated.
 
When the raids occurred, I was conducting research in southern Germany on conflicts over deportation. I got involved in the legal support of the criminalized individuals and collectives. Drawing on research with West African communities living in the camps from late 2017 to 2022 and observing the criminal proceedings, my article analyses three of these operations – in Donauwörth, Ellwangen and Stephansposching – as state responses to migrants’ spontaneous and organized protests against Dublin deportations.  
 
From 2017 to 2019, German authorities deported about 24,000 persons to the country of first entry in Europe, mostly Italy. Yet many deportations could not be enforced as the deportees could not be found in the camps. People usually sought to avoid enforcement by swapping beds and sleeping elsewhere. On some occasions, camp residents spontaneously gathered and verbally protested against the nightly enforcement actions. The three police raids responded to such actions. The article also interprets the raids as responses to long-term organizing by West African communities in the targeted camps. This collective organizing demanded improvements and denounced deportations and deportability – the exposure to deportation while being confined in the reception centres.
 
Racialized emotions in protest policing
 
For the people living in the camps, the raids were deeply intimidating. The black communities sought to challenge their criminalization – both the sanctions ordered by courts and the public narrative by the police, court and the media framing them as aggressive and violent. While many took legal action, spaces outside the courtrooms were more suitable for getting their message across via press conferences and protests in public spaces.
 
Migrants’ perspective on the raids, outlined above, helps to understand how this policing practice relied on emotions: The police press releases projected fear on the black men, framing them as ‘dangerous’. The local courts later amplified this, as the police and camp guards witnessed against the black men, and judges’ decisions affirmed these narratives of threat. The media and politicians also picked up these statements without questioning them. In the article, I situate this production of black ‘danger’ within the structural anti-black racism engrained in German society and state institutions, the anti-black media landscape of those years picturing ‘illegal’ migrants on the Mediterranean, and how court actors and the police habitually cooperate to speed up criminal proceedings. The black communities’ analyses exposed anti-black and anti-migrant racism as interconnected forms of state violence, including deportability in semi-open camps and the criminalization of political protest and solidarity among the camp residents.
 
Besides reinforcing public fears of black migrant men, the raids produced fear among migrants. David Jassey, a Gambian organizer, spoke to me about a ‘fear effect’ resulting from the coercive state practices – the raids, arrests, detention, criminalization, transfers and deportations. Drawing on Jassey’s and other community organizers’ analyses, my article argues that the raids functioned as counterinsurgency. They destroyed or prevented migrants’ long-term organizing, broke their internal solidarity and publicly labelled their actions as regular criminality instead of protest. By criminalizing protest and solidarity among the camp residents and spreading fear, the raids drove many to leave the centres – to other European countries or to ‘illegality’ in Germany.
 
Producing deportability and race
 
The police and criminal courts thus became agents of the contested deportation agenda in two ways: They normalized deportations, legitimizing the ongoing deportation campaigns and entangling criminal and immigration law logics. They also concretely pushed people to leave Germany, in line with the government’s policy on ‘voluntary’ departure. Their actions produced race by normalizing and reinforcing the black migrants’ exposure to deportation and policing, that is, their group-based vulnerability to state violence. Many who were affected by the raids, however, continued to challenge, in courts and beyond, the ways in which racial statecraft disciplines people labelled as ‘others’ to accept their subordinate status. 

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Image credit​: ​Aino Korvensyrjä, Protest at the Augsburg local court, May 2019

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Read the Identities article:
Korvensyrjä, Aino. (2024). Criminalizing black solidarity: Dublin deportations, raids, and racial statecraft in southern Germany. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2023.2282305   OPEN ACCESS​

Read further in Identities:

Affective control: the emotional life of (en)forcing mobility control in Europe

Feeling race: mapping emotions in policing Britain’s borders   OPEN ACCESS

​The emotional governance of immigration controls   OPEN ACCESS
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