Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the work of civil society organizations and legal practitioners who are auxiliary to the deportation apparatus in France. Through daily routine these agents abide and create rules and generate trust in the judicial system thus revealing a debatable legalistic gaze on the state.

Paper long abstract:

Within the EU institutional and legal framework, two individual member states - France and Romania - collaborate to identify, arrest, detain and deport thousands of EU migrants within the EU territory. While France operates a complex and massive deportation apparatus, the Romanian state has openly conceded to receive its deported citizens and to assist the French authorities in policing (ir)regular Romanian migrants. Based on multi-sited research conducted in Romania and France, this paper offers an ethnographic research within a shared deportation regime, analysing the site of confrontation and agreement between states structures and the civil organizations or legal practitioners who allegedly contest state policy of deportation. In doing so, it problematizies a legalistic gaze on the state, which follows the liberal legal tradition in conceiving state as complying with laws and its opponents instrumentalizing legalism to correct situations of law infringement. The legalistic gaze, shared by all interviewees in significant different ways in my research, tends to overlook civil servants discretionary power to shift boundaries of inclusion-exclusion and at the same time it disregards the political power to decide over the design and enforcement of migration laws and regulations. This paper engages with debates in deportation studies and it looks into how state and non-state actors constitute a legal imaginary of the state through daily judicial interactions and discursive confrontations on legal terrain. It argues that the legalistic gaze is created at the encounter between state agents and anti-deportation discourses and actions.