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Paper short abstract

Black resistance to deportation in the German asylum system reveals how the fundamentally carceral nature of this system is embedded in global racial capitalist relations of expropriation and enclosure, and invites us to join the struggles against it.

Paper long abstract

This paper centres the perspectives of people who migrated from West Africa to Germany around 2015, situating asylum and deportation within the longer history of West Africa–Europe relations, the global conjuncture, and state responses to working people’s struggles. Drawing on fieldwork and organising with people facing deportation in the German asylum system and during onward (deportation) journeys (2016–2025), it advances three arguments. First, the perspective of marginalised black mobilities – organising and everyday resistance to deportation – reveals relations that the law obscures: forms of expropriation that exceed the nation-state and the present moment, and the ways asylum and immigration enforcement function as tools or sites of enclosure after arrival. Second, this perspective shows how resistance from below shapes these carceral regimes of power, which respond to transnational struggles over the means of life even as legal categories recast resistance as “illegality” or “criminality”. Third, despite intense repression, resistance to asylum and deportation as an integrated regime takes multiple forms. Practices of fugitivity, everyday refusal, and quiet encroachment lay the groundwork for spontaneous protest, collective organising, and abolitionist critique and imagination. Engaging debates on border abolition, the paper foregrounds the often-overlooked contributions of black organisers and migrants to European movements against borders, traces centre–periphery dynamics of racialised state violence, and asks how we can join struggles against border violence.