Hazardous confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic: The fate of migrants detained yet nondeportable

Abstract

As the French government decided on a lockdown of the population to prevent the spread of COVID-19, it soon appeared that, in an apparent paradox, two forcibly confined categories were particularly at risk: prisoners and detainees. Confronted with multiple mobilizations from civil society, authorities reacted in two distinct ways, significantly reducing the demographic of correctional facilities to allow for protective measures, but refusing to temporarily close detention centers, despite their insalubrious conditions and the impossibility of organizing deportations. These differential policies reveal an implicit moral hierarchy, in which undocumented migrants occupy the lower segment of the social scale, as well as a politics of indifference, which inculcates in them the illegitimacy of their presence and the unworthiness of their lives. Rebellions, self-harm, and hunger strikes are attempts to denounce and resist this intolerable situation.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on research conducted as part of a program on crises supported by the Nomis Foundation. This study was carried out exempted from the Institutional Review Board, and the people mentioned in the article are anonymized. I am grateful to Luc Ginot, public health director at the Ile-de-France Regional Health Agency, and Isabelle Grémy, director of the Ile-de-France Regional Health Observatory, for having facilitated my access to information and my understanding of the coronavirus crisis. I am indebted to the Observatory of the Detention of Foreigners and the organizations composing it, who serve as a watchdog for human rights issues and a legal activist to redress legal violations by the state in places where undocumented migrants are locked down, for the wealth of information contained in their daily exchanges about the situations in the detention centers, which are impenetrable institutions for researchers. I also thank all those in the prison and shelter systems—officials, managers, workers, inmates, and migrants—who have shared their knowledge and experience. As a disclosure, I must add that I am the president of Comede, the Committee for the Health of Exiles, a French nongovernmental organization that assists undocumented foreigners and asylum seekers in addressing their medical, social, and legal issues; Comede is a member of the Observatory of the Detention of Foreigners.

Notes

1 Their letter was published by the website infoLibertaire.net dedicated to the dissemination of news obtained from more than 150 sources in the activist media so as to serve as a repertoire of alternative media (see Infolibertaire 2020).

2 The statement was published by the website of the Assembly Against Administrative Detention Centers, an organization created in January 2019 in support of the collective struggles led by migrants in these centers (see A bas les CRA 2020).

3 The decree of March 16 prohibits all movements outside except under very specific circumstances with adequate permission (see https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/eli/decret/2020/3/16/PRMX2007858D/jo/texte).

4 The language of the law 2020-290 is particularly dramatic in speaking of “health disaster” (catastrophe sanitaire; see https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000041746313&categorieLien=id).

5 These fines amount to $175 million. For details, see La Gazette des Communes (2020).

6 On January 1, there were 70,651 persons incarcerated. Short-stay prisons housed 48,288 prisoners, among whom 44 percent were awaiting trial. They had an average density of 138 percent per cell, with four facilities exceeding 200 percent (see Republic of France, Ministry of Justice 2020).

7 In 2019, there were 1,814 places in the administrative detention centers. There were 18,906 actual deportations that year, representing only 40 percent of those housed (see Republic of France, Cour de Comptes 2020).

8 A detailed and useful chronicle of this mobilization, of the authorities’ response, and of the reactions of the inmates and detainees has been produced by the French section of the International Prison Observatory (OIP 2020), for correctional facilities and by Gisti, the Group of Information and Support of Migrants, for detention centers (see Gisti 2020a) .

9 The Controller General of Facilities of Deprivation of Liberty is an independent public body created in 2007 that controls all institutions where people are deprived of their liberty. See the statement and the letters to the ministers (Controleur General des Lieux de Privation de Liberte 2020a).

10 The Defensor of Rights is an independent public body in charge of guaranteeing the respect of human rights. See his statement to the government (Defenseur de Droits 2020).

11 The letter was published on May 3, three days after the most recent condemnation of the French state by the European Court of Human Rights for its inhumane treatment of prisoners. It is available through the Observatoire International des Prisons (2020).

12 The concern regarding the danger incurred by prisoners and detainees was not specific to France. On March 25, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, called on governments to protect the health and safety of people in detention and other closed facilities, including their staff (UN Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights 2020).

13 These statistics were provided by the special advisor for prison of the minister of justice (interview by the author, June 15, 2020).

14 A detailed presentation of the situation of each detention center was produced on March 20 by Cimade (2020a).

15 These figures were obtained from the Observatory of the Detention of Foreigners (emails on file with the author, of March 16, 2020, and March 26, 2020).

16 See the full text of the decision of the Council of State in Conseil d’Etat (2020) and the response of the organizations in Gisti (2020b).

17 Members of Parliament and observers of the Controller General of Facilities of Deprivation of Liberty can visit detention centers. See, for example, the statement by European Parliament member Manuel Bompard (2020) and Controleur General des Lieux de Privation de Liberte (2020b).

18 The history of detention centers has been recounted by Nicolas Fischer (2017), who has also conducted an ethnographic research in one of the largest of them, focusing his attention on the role of the NGO present to assist in legal cases and confront difficult dilemmas.

19 At the time, the government changed the rules of the legislative elections from majority voting to proportional representation, which allowed, for the first time under the Fifth Republic, the presence of the far right in the French Parliament. Archival footage is available via the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA 1984).

20 This “politics of number,” as it was coined, concerned also the statistics of crime. For the detention centers, the figure that was never publicized was that of the cost (Blic 2009).

21 A yearly report has been produced by Cimade since 2006, providing precious quantitative and qualitative information about detention centers (see Cimade 2020b).

22 An overview of both the statistical data and individual situations is presented in the 2018 Report on Administrative Detention Centers written by the NGOs present in these centers (see Cimade 2018).

23 On the closure of detention centers in Spain, see Majkowska-Tomkin (2020); on immigration regularization in Portugal, see Waldersee (2020); on practices of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, see reporting by the International Rescue Committee (2020).

24 According to the Missing Migrant Project conducted by the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), 10,958 migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean in the past five years; in the first seven months of 2020, there were 497 deaths. These figures are necessarily conservative, as an unknown number of fatalities are not registered. For details, see IOM (2020). As the repression of immigration by European authorities increased and as the humanitarian efforts to rescue people in sinking boats have been hindered, the mortality rate—that is, the number of deaths related to the number of arrivals—has climbed from 2 percent to 8 percent, meaning that for 12 persons reaching the European coast at least one has died in the crossing, making this border the most dangerous in the world (see IOM-Global Migration Data Analysis Centre 2020).

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Didier Fassin

Didier Fassin is James D. Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and chair in public health at the Collège de France. An anthropologist, sociologist, and physician, he studies moral and political issues in contemporary societies. He recently authored The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press) and Life: A Critical User’s Manual (Polity Press), and edited Deepening Divides: How Physical Borders and Social Boundaries Delineate our World (Pluto Press).