Criminalizing black solidarity: Dublin deportations, raids, and racial statecraft in southern Germany

ABSTRACT

Intensive police raids targeted southern German asylum camps in 2018. The police accused black men of rioting against deportation enforcement, and local courts prosecuted numerous individuals. This article examines three such raids as political policing during a time of a strong yet contested state mandate for deportations. Drawing on observations of court proceedings, police and court statements, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted over several years with West African residents of these camps, I analyse how the police and courts intervened in local conflicts over deportation. As these authorities sought to restore deportability, emotions, particularly fear, functioned as a vital supplement to exercising state violence. By criminalizing protest and solidarity among the migrants and spreading fear, the raids drove many to leave the centres. The police and courts also performed fear as they depicted black, dangerous ‘others’ as endangering law enforcement and the ‘Nation’. This contributed to the broader deportation agenda and produced race by normalizing migrants’ exposure to deportation and policing.

KEYWORDS:

• Deportation
• race
• migrant protest
• policing
• criminalization
• affect

Introduction

The first week of May 2018 witnessed some moral panic in the German media. National and regional media reported on a ‘mob’ of 150–200 black¹ Africans threatening immigration law enforcement in a reception centre² in Ellwangen, Baden-Württemberg. A police press release claimed that a deportation had been ‘hindered with violence’ by ‘about 50 residents’ of the centre, forcing a small enforcement patrol to retreat with ‘aggressive and threatening behaviour’ without the Togolese deportee. The police further argued that after the patrol left, ‘about 150 presumed refugees (mutmaßliche Flüchtlinge) (..) from Nigeria, Guinea, and Cameroon formed an illicit assembly (zusammengerottet)’.³ Three days later, starting at 5 a.m., about 500 officers, including heavily armed riot units, raided the centre. The police claimed to have indications that the centre’s residents were arming themselves to resist deportations. Seven men were taken to pre-trial detention and 23 persons were arrested for resisting the police during the raid. Later the local court convicted most of them. The charges and convictions were unrelated to the original ‘riot’, and the police published no concrete description of the ‘violence’ against the deportation enforcement patrol. This inconsistency did not attract public attention. Journalists and policymakers discussed ‘Ellwangen’ as an attack on law enforcement and the ‘Nation’, expanding on the police statements and calling for more deportations (Jakob 2018). ‘Ellwangen’ contributed to the public’s moral panic regarding black and brown migrant men in Germany. After the popular ‘welcome culture’ in the summer of 2015, this prolonged panic led to the acceptance of more deportations of asylum seekers (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). ‘Ellwangen’ and the pictures of young black men, handcuffed and accompanied by masked police, were also used to pass yet another law that facilitated deportations.⁴

This article explores how the police and courts managed local conflicts over deportation with such raids and how emotions became a vital supplement to coercive state practice. Several similar operations occurred in southern Germany⁵ during the intense 2017–2019 campaign to increase so-called Dublin deportations,⁶ mainly to Italy (Korvensyrjä and Osa 2022). The raided camps were so-called reception centres (Erstaufnahmeeinrichtungen), accommodating migrants in the first phase of their asylum or Dublin procedure and serving as sites of deportation enforcement. In the Bavarian Donauwörth in March 2018 and Stephansposching in October 2018, the police accused West African men of rioting and stopping a deportation to Italy.⁷ Prosecutions resulting from these three events numbered around 70 black men. This article analyses these three raids, focusing on what happened on the ground between the police, courts, and migrants, in the raided centres, the criminal legal system, and the courtrooms.

In addition to observations of court proceedings and analysis of police and court statements, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with West African residents of these centres over several years. The methodology juxtaposes police and court narratives of migrant danger with the perspective of the black communities targeted by the raids. This reveals how the raids operated as political policing responding to protests against deportation during a deportation campaign. The protests included spontaneous actions – nocturnal gatherings interpreted as ‘riots’ by the police – and long-term organizing, both linked to the migrants’ tacit practices of avoiding deportation. These different actions are analysed as part of the asymmetrical negotiations (Eule, Loher, and Wyss 2018) over deportation between street-level actors, including people living in the centres. The coercive responses by the police and courts sought to restore deportability (De Genova 2002) in the centres: the migrants’ imminent exposure to deportation, or its concrete possibility. As the article shows, the production of fear by state agents was key to these efforts in several ways.

Hinger et al. (2018) show how earlier, similar protests in a reception centre in Osnabrück⁸ in 2014–2015 revealed and disturbed deportability as the functioning logic of such centres. There, peaceful ‘blockades’ by up to one hundred people stopped 36 Dublin deportations. The large gathering meant that the police could not find the deportee. The differences are also worth noting: The Osnabrück protests were planned, coordinated, and conducted by (white) German citizens living outside the camp, together with people inside. The police refrained from using force. The authorities tolerated the protests until a 2015 amendment banned the announcement of deportation dates, making such protests impossible to plan (Hinger, Kirchoff, and Wiese 2018). In the southern German cases, the police and courts responded with force and criminalization. The political mandate for deportations was harsher by 2018, and southern Germany is a conservative region with strict asylum and deportation policies. I argue that it also mattered who was protesting: Exclusively black and brown persons, primarily men, without legal residence and considered ‘unwanted’ by the state.

In the following section, I review scholarly debates to create the context for the article’s argument on the production of deportability and race in the raids and on state agents’ use of emotions in exercising force. I then explain the contested nature of deportation in the German asylum system after 2015 and describe my methodology. My argument is laid out in three parts: first, I analyse how the raids criminalized and repressed solidarity and dissent among the people living in the asylum camps and drove them to leave the camps. Second, I examine how the police and courts depicted the black men as ‘dangerous’ to rationalize coercion and, more broadly, the deportation agenda. Third, I show how the targets spoke out about state violence and its felt impact.

Race, emotions, and the political policing of migration

The problem of race (Gilmore 2022; Hall et al. 2021) has received little attention in studies on anti-deportation protests and conflicts over deportation in Germany. My analysis builds on existing studies on German policing, race, and racism (Bruce-Jones 2015; Hunold and Singelnstein 2022; Thompson 2022). Unlike this scholarship, I focus on migration control and immigration enforcement as central to producing race in Germany. I understand race as a group-based hierarchy of life chances and vulnerability to state violence. Racism refers to practices producing such a hierarchy, today often legitimized with nationality and immigration status (Gilmore 2022; Sharma 2020).

Anthropology of the state and policing (Fassin 2013, 2015a; Feldman 1991; Nagengast 1994; Schmidt 2023; Stoler 2009; Yonucu 2022) helps to conceptualize how emotions⁹ are part of exercising state violence and producing race. When ‘legitimate force’ is studied ethnographically, the normative distinction between force and violence is bracketed (Nagengast 1994). Exploring the social, symbolic, and affective dimensions of state violence as an everyday practice unsettles the perspective of criminal justice and immigration law. By law, danger to public order and security justifies enforcement actions. The legal concept of danger (Gefahr)¹⁰ is seemingly neutral and colour-blind. Legitimate force must be proportional, while the police have significant discretionary powers to define the dangers justifying force (Fassin 2013, 127). Prosecutors and judges also assess dangers when they work with the police (Bruce-Jones 2015, Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt 2016; Schlüter and Schoenes 2016). Anthropology shows how affects and values are key to exercising coercion as an everyday state practice. Emotions, such as fear or hostility, ‘are produced, circulate and are appropriated’ (Fassin 2015b, x) when state agents and others involved in coercive state practices define and address dangers. This can be understood as a moral or affective economy of repression (Fassin 2015a; 2015c, 95; Makaremi 2015; Schmidt 2023). Didier Fassin (2015c) and Chowra Makaremi (2015) show how emotional and moral justifications in everyday court and police practice rely on and shape broader social ideas of ‘dangerous’ groups.

To paraphrase the feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed (2004), coercive state practices ‘stick’ emotions onto individuals, groups and entities in a way that is relational. Fearmongering about migrants as ‘dangerous’ also conjures up the ‘Nation’ as an object of love and care and a community of value (Ahmed 2004, 1; Anderson 2013). Such racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva 2019) thus justify the street-level exercise of force against ‘others’ and propel narratives of dangerous outsiders, creating public legitimacy for deportation and policing (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018; Hall et al. 1978). We should, in fact, see the legal, moral, and affective entangled already in how immigration law frames foreign nationals as a potential danger, deportable in principle and thus having less value than the citizens in the nation-state (Anderson 2013; Schwarz 2010).

My observations of the court proceedings after the three raids showed how the performance of fear by police officers, guards, prosecutors, and judges portrayed black men as dangerous. This both justified the raids and beyond that, the ongoing deportations. Importantly, ethnography with the camp residents revealed how the raids produced fear among the migrants. Responding to local conflicts over deportation in the reception centres, the raids operated as political policing. They sought to repress the migrants’ spontaneous protests and their long-term organizing, both disturbing the orderly enforcement of deportations. By spreading fear among the migrants, the raids destroyed their internal solidarity. The migrants’ resistance was framed as regular criminality. These are familiar counterinsurgency strategies (Khalili 2013; Seigel 2018; Yonucu 2022). I show how in these cases, such practices contributed to the broader deportation agenda and produced race by normalizing migrants’ exposure to state violence.

Contested production of deportability after 2015

The asylum system or the humanitarian migration regime is a central site for conducting deportations and producing deportability in Germany (Ellermann 2009; Kirchhoff and Lorenz 2018). The large, semi-open reception centres, managed by the Länder were pioneered in southern Germany in the early 1980s and were thereafter adopted across Germany (Kirchhoff and Lorenz 2018). Colloquially they are known as camps (Lager). In 2015 authorities expanded them to respond to an increasing number of people seeking asylum. For example, Bavaria opened extra-large reception and deportation centres in former military barracks, with capacities of up to 3000 persons.¹¹ Besides accommodating migrants in the first phase of their asylum or Dublin procedure in the reception centres, authorities increasingly aimed to deport them directly from these centres (also via ‘voluntary’ returns) before they were ‘transferred’ to smaller accommodations.

The centres are typically located outside city centres. The residence is compulsory and, after 2015, the length of stay was gradually extended to 24 months for those without a positive asylum decision.¹² Residents are not allowed to leave the camp for more than 24 or 72 hours, and they need special permission to leave the municipality at all (Residenzpflicht). They are electronically monitored, not allowed to work and receive benefits in kind instead of money.

The Dublin III Regulation mandates that in most cases, migrants have their asylum request processed in the European country of first entry and do not apply elsewhere. However, they are usually allowed to remain in Germany to lodge their asylum claim if the authorities cannot conduct the deportation to the country of first entry within six months. Between 2017 and 2019, German authorities prioritized Dublin deportations because of their relative feasibility, as they do not require identity documents (Korvensyrjä and Osa 2022). A fingerprint match in the EURODAC database is sufficient. Legal remedies are mostly ineffective. To enforce Dublin deportations, the Land police usually entered the reception centres early in the morning to arrest individuals and put them directly on passenger flights later that morning. Room and bed numbers – as well as security guards who knew the residents – helped to locate the deportees. However, this type of enforcement could be evaded by not sleeping in one’s assigned bed.

The raids analysed in this article occurred in a period when the Bavarian police not only conducted regular deportations and several raids responding to protests or predicted protests against deportation but also hundreds of intensive police controls of asylum camps. These were conducted based on a 2017 amendment of the Bavarian police law which defined asylum accommodation as ‘dangerous places’ (gefährliche Orte, police jargon), which the police could enter at their discretion and perform identity controls without reasonable suspicion (Ziyal and Böhm 2020). In Baden-Württemberg and other German Länder, the police use the term ‘crime hotspots’ (kriminalitätsbelastete Orte) to refer to such areas with an arguably higher-than-average crime rate (Ziyal and Böhm 2020)

A note on methodology

The article draws on fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2022 in southern Germany with migrants from West Africa ordered to leave Germany and with activist networks. West Africans were a growing group in the German asylum system after 2015. They were often affected by Dublin deportation orders having arrived in Europe via the Central Mediterranean Route from Libya to Italy. Like the majority of West African migrants in Germany at the time, my interlocutors were mainly men under 40.

I learned about the three Dublin-related raids examined in this article during fieldwork in 2018. I used my previous experience watching and accompanying court cases to support the migrants’ litigation and followed the criminal cases over several years. I became an observing participant (Russo 2018) in a highly asymmetric setting. I accompanied research participants on their visits to lawyers, read and translated documents from authorities and explained the complex legal procedures – always making clear that I was not a lawyer. Together with activist and advocacy groups, I published short reports on court hearings and calls to attend them.¹³ I facilitated contact between the black communities in the camps and activist groups and the media, documented their protests, helped to publish and distribute their statements, and organized public talks with some of them. Such practices allowed me to research sensitive topics among persons under pending deportation while contributing to their economies of information and resources (Horton 2015).

The main charges were breach of peace (Landfriedensbruch), resistance (Widerstand) or assault on enforcement officers (tätlicher Angriff) and freeing of a prisoner. Many defendants were subject to pre-trial detention. With more severe charges, public trials were held. Yet, in most cases, local courts ordered migrants to pay fines, issuing so-called penalty orders (Strafbefehl). This accelerated procedure yields a conviction without trial unless the individual appeals within 14 days. Regarding the three raids, I observed trials (local and regional court) against six persons (10 hearing days) – including one person brought to court from pre-trial detention. I read minutes written by others in three further trials.¹⁴ I also followed – through lawyers, activists, and the defendants – the proceedings in several other cases, which did not result in trials due to plea bargains or deportations. I observed one administrative court hearing against the Land Baden-Württemberg in February 2021, following the complaint by a former resident of the LEA Ellwangen, Alassa Mfouapon, challenging the lack of search warrant and thus the legality of the raid. Besides the defendants or plaintiffs in the abovementioned cases, I conducted repeated conversations with further persons who had been criminalized or otherwise affected by the raids. To better understand police and court perspectives, I analysed documents issued by courts to the defendants – letters communicating the charges, penalty orders, and court decisions – and public statements of the police and courts. I also paid attention to what other relevant administrators – such as directors of the reception centres – said in public and how the media covered the incidents.

The raids

All three cases involved a nocturnal gathering of the centres’ residents during a deportation enforcement operation. In Ellwangen, the small enforcement patrol left the deportee in the centre and retreated after about 50 residents gathered in the yard insisted on this. In Donauwörth, two months earlier, the police did not find the Gambian deportee. A large crowd of different nationalities gathered outside due to a fire alarm, some of them expressing frustration at the police search. Such alarms were a standard warning signal by the Gambian community, numbering about 350 at the time. The police later claimed that an ‘aggressive mob’ of Gambian men had hindered the subsequent search for the deportee.¹⁵ In Stephansposching, in a second deportation operation of the night, the police did not find the Sierra Leonean deportee. A Nigerian man, woken by the police for identity control, complained and was arrested. Other residents gathered around him in solidarity. During the ensuing debate with the police, the arrested man escaped from the police car.

After these incidents, 200–500 riot police and dogs raided the centres. In Bavaria, they used long sticks and pepper gas. The police and local courts framed the nocturnal gatherings as ‘illicit assemblies’ (Zusammenrottung), punishable as a breach of peace. In Donauwörth, the police arrested 30 Gambian men, and the Augsburg Local Court ordered pre-trial detention. After two months, the court released those who had not been deported, deeming all guilty and issuing penalty orders against the adults. In Ellwangen, the prosecution took a different path. The police arrested 23 West African men for resistance during the response raid itself, and the court later issued penalty orders. Seven more men were taken to pre-trial detention on other charges: assault on enforcement officers during the raid, drug dealing, and theft. None of these was related to the alleged nocturnal riot. In Stephansposching, 16 persons were arrested for a nocturnal breach of peace, four of them taken to pre-trial detention on graver charges, including freeing a prisoner. The media publicized the arrests, and policymakers condemned the ‘riots’. Policymakers’ and politicians’ law and order statements reinforced by the media promoted a negative, criminal, and racialized image of the centres and people living there, further weakening local solidarity with migrants.

‘No one of our brothers go!’ Restoring deportability by producing fear

While the police, courts and media portrayed the residents of the raided camps as a danger to public security and order, my research with the residents revealed how the raids responded to their political organizing and spontaneous protests. Because reception centres are infrastructures for deportation, political activities are often explicitly banned. In Donauwörth, the Gambian community of about 350 had, however, started to regularly meet a few months before the raid. They petitioned the centre’s management for improvements, demanding a halt to deportations and access to health care and work. Calling themselves the Gambian Integration Committee, they also requested that the local police end the frequent stop-and-searches of young Gambians. In Stephansposching and Ellwangen, the black communities addressed their centres’ management with similar concerns and requests. In Ellwangen, they announced a public meeting with the press and local organizations for 3 May 2018, to discuss these concerns, but the raid on the same day effectively cancelled this meeting.

In Donauwörth, the Gambian community saw the raid not as a response to one contested deportation but rather as an attempt to ‘destroy’ their long-term organizing by ‘attacking’ them – as David Jassey, a community speaker, explained.¹⁶ The group had first organized a strike in February 2018 after receiving no response to their petitions. Announcing they would voluntarily leave for Italy – the destination written on their deportation orders – they headed to the train station. Hundreds of police came to stop them, and the centre director persuaded them to return to the camp. His promises did not materialize, so the group began a second strike. They stopped essential maintenance work – dishwashing, cleaning, and laundry, tasks which they undertook at a pay of 80c/hr. This caused significant disruption to the centre’s routines until the police raid of March 14 ended the strike after one week.

Originating in European colonial military strategy in Africa, razzia means brief incursions into ‘enemy territory’ where an insurgent population cannot be controlled directly (Khalili 2013). In Donauwörth, camp authorities faced an unruly situation of weekly political meetings with hundreds of participants, petitions, strikes and walkouts, besides the usual avoidance of deportation by swapping beds and triggering fire-alarms. The raid intervened here with a ‘fear effect’, to use Jassey’s term, aiming not only at ‘those who were arrested but also those who were in the Lager [camp]’. Moreover, migrants elsewhere were signalled ‘not [to] follow our example’.¹⁷ The authorities’ strategy to quell the rebellion by spreading fear was a sum of the raid, the stigmatizing press narrative, the arrests, the two months-long detention in isolation from the others, criminal proceedings, and penalty orders. Later an increased police presence made Donauwörth into a ‘terrifying place’.¹⁸ The remaining residents reported that deportations occurred more frequently. The guards made them stay in their beds at given times. Transfers, a common practice to repress migrant protests in German camps (Hinger and Kirchhoff 2019), were applied in all three cases: protest organizers and persons released from detention were transferred to other centres.

Before the raid, the Gambian community had challenged their isolation from each other and the individual appearance of deportations, like other migrant protests have done (Hinger, Kirchhoff, and Wiese 2018; Kirchhoff and Lorenz 2018). The spontaneous nocturnal gatherings in all three camps directly disputed deportation as an individual fate. ‘Why not take us all!’ shouted a Gambian man at the police during the nocturnal incident in Donauwörth. He explained to me that the loud, nightly police searches were ‘power performances’ to intimidate residents into accepting their deportation like ‘sheep’.¹⁹ According to security guards who witnessed in court against the migrants, further shouts from the nightly gathering included: ‘No one of our brothers go!’, ‘This is a prison!’ and ‘We are not slaves!’²⁰ In other words, during such spontaneous nocturnal gatherings, the camp residents overcame their usual fear, voiced shared experiences of racism, and denounced deportation expressing mutual solidarity. The reference to slavery, frequent among my West African interlocutors, evoked the long historical memory in West Africa of violent Western European oppression, reaching from kidnapping people for transatlantic slavery to colonialism and to contemporary borders.

The authorities showed little tolerance for such protests against deportation within the camps. While evading deportations by sleeping elsewhere was common, the nocturnal gatherings posed a more direct challenge. The frequent triggering of the fire alarm to warn others in Donauwörth was already an exercise of collective power. To expand on Jassey’s analysis of the ‘fear effect’, the harsh police response may be understood as counterinsurgency. Scholars of political policing note that counterinsurgency seeks to sow fear and destroy solidarity among the insurgents while delegitimising them in public (Khalili 2013; Seigel 2018; Yonucu 2022). In southern Germany, the raids not only crushed resistance, but also indirectly contributed to the deportation objectives. In all three cases, the ‘fear effect’ meant that hundreds left for other European countries or preferred ‘illegality’ in Germany. Only a smaller group in Donauwörth, including David Jassey, continued to support the litigation – a process that I closely accompanied.

Affective production of ‘danger’ and normalising deportations

The police narrative of migrant aggression communicated in press releases was presented at the article’s beginning. This section analyses the courts and the criminal proceedings as a further key arena for shaping public ideas of the black camp residents as dangerous and criminal. Besides judges and prosecutors, the police were involved as witnesses and criminal investigators compiling the case files on which the proceedings were based. Private guards working in the reception centres appeared as the key witnesses in the Donauwörth and Stephansposching cases.

In Donauwörth, the main charge mentioned a ‘mob prepared to use violence’, with a ‘hostile will’, causing a ‘significant danger to public security’ – not mentioning physical violence or individual deeds. The first appeal trial was held in November 2018. The room was packed with the Gambian community, friends and supporting activists.²¹ The two defence lawyers emphasized that neither in court nor in earlier police questioning had witnesses unambiguously identified their clients as individuals present at the alleged crime scene. They had also not described the actions of the two men. The judge, however, focused on the witnesses’ emotions, asking each of them: ‘Did you feel that the situation was dangerous?’²² The police officers, guards, and a social worker answered in the affirmative and added further descriptions, arguing that there was ‘a lot of hate towards us’, the crowd was ‘aggressive and loud’ and that they were faced with an ‘increasingly threatening situation’ that could at any moment ‘escalate’. The judge’s reasoning emphasized the ‘big picture’ [Gesamtsituation] rather than individual deeds or reliable identification of the alleged perpetrators. She upheld the sentences, focusing on the fear expressed in witness statements. Similarly, in the Stephansposching case, such affective depictions of ‘danger’ were key to the case, as the offence of breach of peace merely requires ‘threatening acts of violence’ by ‘a crowd of people’ (Criminal Code, Section 125, 1 (2)). Proceeding to deeds is not required. Thus, police officers and guards testifying about their fear in facing the nocturnal gathering were crucial to both cases.

I understand such witness statements as performances of fear within a broader affective production of ‘danger’ in the courts and beyond. Analysing how lethal police violence against black persons is often legitimized as self-defence, Eddie Bruce-Jones notes the tricky nature of expressions of affect in criminal proceedings: Fear is a subjective state (Bruce-Jones 2015, 43). The police and private guards are however professional ‘violence workers’, trained to use and justify force (Seigel 2018). Their accounts of fear, threat and danger are not simply subjective but deliberately performative to satisfy the legal requirements for using force (Schmidt 2023). Prosecutors and judges know to use, even elicit, such expressions of affect – unless they wish to dismiss charges or acquit the defendants and thus delegitimise police actions. Bruce-Jones reveals the broader stakes in police officers’ ‘assessments of fear and appropriate response’ and how courts deal with such assessments. The courts’ work is ‘mediated by the political interest in upholding the ability of the police to operate in a certain way’ (Bruce-Jones 2015, 44). He also emphasizes the structural nature of anti-black racism permeating the police, courts, and other state institutions.

I argue that in the three cases examined here, danger was produced and circulated within the courts as a legal, affective and racialized notion. This was done by judges, prosecutors, the police and guards – all well aware of the strong state mandate to deport. Further actors beyond the courts amplified this production and circulation of fear during the 2017–2019 deportation campaigns. This production of danger within and across institutions and state agencies also has deep societal, structural, and historical dimensions (Bruce-Jones 2015, Fassin 2015c; Makaremi 2015).

Within the courts, the police performance of fear, attributing ‘aggression’ and ‘threat’ to the targets of policing, seems credible to prosecutors and judges in part because of routinized professional solidarity between the three professional groups (Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt 2016). Courts can also reduce expensive trial time or avoid trials altogether by taking police statements as fact. Prosecutors very quickly compose penalty orders and charges based on the investigation file complied by the police. All this contributes to the common practice of charging the targets of everyday policing with resistance, bodily harm, or insult (Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt 2016; Schlüter and Schoenes 2016). In the trials, the police appeared as professional witnesses, emanating credibility in their posture and manner of speaking. They often wore uniforms and carried guns, signalling legitimate authority to use force (Schlüter and Schoenes 2016). Most guards who witnessed seemed relatively comfortable in the courtroom and spoke German, and judges gave them ample time to express their views. On the contrary, the migrants mostly appeared as defendants, against whom the cases were directed. The court barely gave them chances to describe how they saw the situation and how they had felt, to test whether the fear performed by the police and guards was reasonable. They often depended on interpreters, who were not able to keep up with the speed of the proceedings, some not even fluent in the given West African language. Lawyers often advised the defendants to remain silent.

The resonances between different state actors’ discourse reveal the intersection between the criminal legal system and the deportation campaigns. The police vice president in Ellwangen congratulated the officers for having ‘kept a cool head’ despite the migrants’ ‘extremely aggressive, violent confrontation’. The raid defended the ‘rule of law’ against a ‘lawless space’ in the centre.²³ The Federal Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer of the Bavarian CSU, argued that the migrants had ‘slapped the face of the law-abiding population’ and ‘trampled on their right to hospitality [Gastrecht]’ (Frankfurter Allgemeine 2018). This old Prussian and National-Socialist police law concept of Gastrecht – tying non-Germans’ presence to good behaviour and worthiness of hospitality (Schwarz 2010) – was also invoked by an Augsburg judge in the Donauwörth case. Suggesting that the number of refugee-migrants was large, she noted that they were only ‘guests’ in Germany and ‘should behave accordingly’. She claimed that the defendants and their co-residents had shown ‘unacceptable solidarity’ in protesting against law enforcement measures.²⁴ The minister and the judge thus marked the limits of the ‘welcome culture’ and designated legitimate targets of deportation. Echoing the words of the police commander in Ellwangen, the judge on the Stephansposching case spoke of black men wanting to ‘create a lawless space’. In her reasoning she proclaimed, speaking in the voice of an Interior Minister: ‘We must above all ensure that future deportations can be enforced, without such escalations and aggressions (…) police officers must be able to do their work’.²⁵

This shared discourse across state actors reveals the political interest to uphold policing powers, specifically during the deportation campaigns of the period. Such a political will was well exemplified in the Ellwangen case. The police narrative changed after its factual and legal inconsistencies became evident, yet the routinized public perceptions of black men as a threat persisted. During the weeks-long moral panic about black ‘aggressors’ and ‘rioters’, the media and policymakers showed little interest in what the police had done inside the centre. When it turned out that the police did not have the search warrant required by the German constitution to enter homes and dormitories, the police argued that the raid was not at all connected to the alleged aggression stopping the deportation. A senior police officer claimed instead that this large-scale operation had been a simple identity control operation. In a dry, technical manner, he explained that the police checked 294 black men and about 20 were arrested for resisting the police.²⁶ The Stuttgart Administrative Court supported this new narrative in February 2021 when hearing the former resident Alassa Mfouapon’s complaint about the lack of warrant and legal basis for the raid. To back future policing, the court at the same time ruled that a search warrant was not required to enter reception centres, implying that they are not constitutionally protected, unlike homes and hotel rooms.²⁷

The association of black and brown migrants with criminality and danger is key to broader, structural racism (Anderson 2013; El-Tayeb 2016; Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt 2016; Hall et al. 1978; Schwarz 2010; Sharma 2020). The idea of black people as inferior, impulsive, aggressive, and violent has been built into German state institutions and citizenship since the late 19^th century when Germany colonized large areas in Africa (Bruce-Jones 2015; El-Tayeb 1999, 2016). The people targeted by the raids came from countries like Cameroon, Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria, parts of which Germany colonized before WW1. The postcolonial order of nation-states has recodified colonial racism into a hierarchy of nationality and immigration status, today legitimizing exclusion from mobility and life’s resources (Sharma 2020). To justify this global apartheid, contemporary migration control agendas frame black and brown migrations as ‘invasions’ and ‘crises’ (El-Tayeb 2016; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018; Hall et al. 1978). In 2018, when European governments sought to close the Central Mediterranean Route, images of black and brown ‘illegals’ and ‘criminals’ were all over the German media, creating immediate resonance with the press pictures of the raids showing black men escorted by the police.

When police and guards performed fear in the courts, black migrants ended up depicted as dangerous ‘others’ – resonating with broader social narratives and structural racism (Fassin 2015c; Makaremi 2015). This production of danger by diverse state actors also affectively interpellated the ‘Law’, the ‘Nation’ and the ‘Population’ as objects needing protection and care. Black migrants were in turn signalled to obey; a double message typical of racial policing (Basu 2016).

Speaking out against state violence

‘What happened in the media is not what we experienced here in Ellwangen’, said Alassa Mfouapon, opening the residents’ press conference six days after the raid in the LEA Ellwangen in May 2018. I was kneeling in front of the speakers’ table, pointing my video camera at these women and men from Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, and Cameroon. To challenge the narrative that depicted them as aggressive and deportations as the norm, the black communities in the raided camps mostly used spaces outside of the courts. Speaking in public they explained how it felt to wake to riot police breaking into their bedrooms, getting arrested, photographed, and how it felt to be framed as ‘aggressive’ and ‘violent’, jailed, and criminalized. They also talked about what it was like to live in a place regularly targeted by loud night-time deportation searches. They criticized the raids, court cases and deportations as anti-black racism.

In the Ellwangen press conference, a male speaker highlighted the political nature of their nocturnal gathering that stopped the deportation enforcement: ‘We were just trying to send a signal to the German government that what we are going through in this LEA is not good for us. Ninety five percent of the people [here] have Dublin’. A woman criticized the media’s lack of interest in their views: ‘Because we are black, they [police, authorities, media] see us like thieves and violent people … [The police] came in a very violent way, breaking doors, beating people, injuring people. In the media, they hide that because they see us as slaves’. She also noted the dangerous journeys to Europe and violent policing and deportation in Germany as manifestations of racism. A young man described the fear and panic induced by the loud, coordinated breaking down of the bedroom doors – which were unlocked –, after which masked officers stormed into their bedrooms shouting ‘Polizei! Polizei!’, flashed lights around and began arresting them. Frightened, many jumped out of the windows, breaking limbs, assuming the police were orchestrating a collective deportation.

Those detained had even more tangible experiences of being framed as ‘aggressive’. A West African defendant spent three months in pre-trial detention, suspected of assaulting the police during the raid. Masked officers had torn him and his roommates from sleep at 5 a.m., yelling orders in German and English, languages he did not understand. Panicked, he tried to flee, but in seconds officers pushed him to the floor and tied his hands with a plastic cord. Through an interpreter, he briefly talked about his fear, panic and lacking language skills in the trial, but the court still convicted him. He told me later that the three months in pre-trial detention in complete social isolation and without being able to speak the language used by the institution had been very tough. In court, he had felt intense shame when seeing the female police officer who had held his naked legs to the floor during arrest, as he had only been wearing boxers.²⁸ Another very young man, arrested during the Donauwörth raid, had a similar experience in pre-trial detention, in his case followed by immigration detention and deportation to Italy. For him, the hardest bit to bear had been to see the photograph of his arrest circulated in the media. The picture went viral to illustrate ‘rioting’ and ‘aggressive’ Gambian migrants. He was at pains to explain to family and friends back home who saw the picture that his only offence had been to try to enter his room to lie down.²⁹ These accounts echo research on the long-term emotional consequences of policing, imprisonment and deportation, including ‘feelings of humiliation, powerlessness and self-accusation’, restriction of movements, isolation and fear and distrust in authorities (Plümecke, Wilopo, and Naguib 2022; Thompson 2022; Wyss 2022).

If ‘arrest is the political art of individualizing disorder’ (Feldman 1991, 109), its felt consequences are often strategic: fear, powerlessness and isolation. Many in the raided centres continued organizing by speaking in public and supporting litigation to counter these effects. They continued to denounce deportability. On our visits to the Augsburg courts to accompany defendants, David Jassey repeatedly reminded me that the charges against the 30 Gambians taken from the Donauwörth camp were individual only in appearance. Community members attended trials together and organized protests before the court. In 2021 a new judge finally closed the two remaining cases – indirectly admitting the lack of evidence against the defendants charged with breach of peace by participating in an ‘illicit assembly’.

Conclusion

This article analysed how the police and criminal courts dealt with local conflicts over deportation and deportability in southern German reception centres during an intense deportation campaign. These authorities portrayed spontaneous nocturnal migrant gatherings as a security threat and criminality, not as political protests. I showed how emotions served an important role in the execution of state violence. The performance of fear by police officers and guards in the criminal proceedings was key in how the courts portrayed black migrant men as a danger in a legal, racial, and affective sense. In the criminal proceedings the police and courts drew on and reinforced public narratives on ‘dangerous’ groups. At the same time, by criminalizing protest and solidarity among the camp residents and spreading fear, the raids drove many to leave the centres. This ‘fear effect’ was multiplied by coercive state practices – the raids, arrests, detention, criminalization, transfers, and deportations. Functioning as counterinsurgency, raids also destroyed or prevented the migrants’ long-term organizing.

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 the black migrants’s exposure to deportation and policing, that is, their group-based vulnerability to state violence (Gilmore 2022). The black communities’ analysis, on the contrary, revealed 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. Many continued also after the raids to challenge the ways in which racial statecraft disciplines people labelled as ‘others’ to accept their subordinate status.

Acknowledgements

I thank the people who struggled in the camps and courts, and the many activists and lawyers involved, particularly Rex Osa, Justizwatch and David Jassey. I am likewise indebted to the anonymous reviewers, the editors of the Special Issue, and numerous friends and colleagues, who provided valuable comments on the draft and other support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Kone Foundation with a PhD grant.

Notes

1. By not capitalizing the word black, I follow scholars like Vanessa Thompson, Kathleen McKittrick, and Paul Gilroy, who have emphasized the multiplicity of black experiences and identities.

2. LEA or Landeserstaufnahmeeinrichtung.

3. Allen Police Headquarters, press release on May 2, 2018.

4. The 2019 Orderly Return Act.

5. Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, two Länder.

6. Explained in section 2.

7. Further similar operations against West Africans were conducted in 2018 at least in Donaueschingen (Baden-Württemberg) and Deggendorf (Bavaria).

8. A city in Lower Saxony.

9. The article uses emotions and affects synonymously.

10. My analysis brackets the different legal notions of danger in immigration and criminal law, which these cases blurred.

11. In 2018 all Bavarian reception centres were renamed as ANKER centres – from the German words Arrival, Decision, Deportation. In Baden-Württemberg, the LEAs (Landeserstaufnahmeeinrichtung) are a similar model.

12. At the Länder authorities’ discretion.

13. Particularly with Justizwatch, Culture of Deportation and Refugees for Refugees.

14. By local NGO’s and activists. For the sake of accuracy, I do not quote these in the article, but they provide important background information.

15. Press releases on 14.3. and 15.3.2018, Police Headquarters Northern Swabia.

16. Interview 2018.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Interview 2018.

20. Penalty orders received by interlocutors; Fieldnotes Augsburg Local Court, November 2018; Interview with lawyers 2018.

21. This paragraph draws on Fieldnotes Augsburg Local Court, November 2018.

22. ‘Haben Sie die Situation als gefährlich empfunden?‘ My italics.

23. Allen Police Headquarters, press conference May 3, 2018.

24. Fieldnotes Augsburg Local Court, November 2018.

25. Fieldnotes Deggendorf Local Court September 2019.

26. Fieldnotes Ellwangen Local Court, August 2018.

27. Fieldnotes Stuttgart Administrative Court, February 2021.

28. Interview 2018.

29. Interview 2018.