Paper short abstract:

France deploys strategies directed at containing and forcing the mobility of some EU citizens, by policing, detaining and deporting them. This paper reveals and analyses the technologies of confinement against Romanian citizens from the surveillance of "Roma camps" to immigration detention centres.

Paper long abstract:

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 citizens. A bilateral agreement enables Romanian and French agents on the ground to identify, localise and police poor and destitute Romanian citizens. Based on securitization of mobility, a process in which people are considered criminals due to their lack of residential status, France develops technologies of racial confinement such as so-called Roma camps. This targeted enforcement, spatial containment and ethnic profiling notably against Roma ethnics is a prime example of state practices towards racialized and criminalised category of deportable citizens.

This paper builds on the research I have conducted between 2016-2017 in the Paris region among public servants, police officers, NGOs and private agents, administrative and judicial courts personnel, and people who were submitted to the deportation apparatus. Documenting and analysing the spatial exclusion coupled with bilateral police collaboration between France and Romania, the paper investigates the ways in which police surveillance, control and detention are used against undesirable EU citizens. At the same time, it exposes and problematizes forms of resilience and contestation from the part of those EU citizens who are recurrently exposed to state' technologies of confinement from the surveillance of "Roma camps" to the immigration detention centres.