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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses migrant regularisation case files as carceral data infrastructures. It shows how legal status depends on accumulated documents shaped by fragile relations of care, where translation, registration, and bureaucratic attention enable rights while simultaneously disciplining lives.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines migrant regularisation through arraigo and “exceptional circumstances” as a form of carceral data infrastructure centred on the administrative case file (expediente). Rather than treating documentation as a neutral requirement, we analyse the case file as a technology of governance that produces credibility, deservingness, and legal legibility by translating lived experiences into administrative categories such as permanence, integration, social ties, economic means, and public order.

Drawing on ethnographic research on regularisation processes in Spain, we show that legal status depends on the accumulation of documents whose validity is neither technical nor automatic. The production of a viable case file relies on fragile and often invisible relations of care: interpreters who translate accurately, police officers who carefully register personal data, social workers who draft reports, and NGOs and lawyers who organise evidence and guide applicants through complex procedures. Minor errors, mistranslations, or inattentive bureaucratic encounters can compromise entire applications, turning administrative details into mechanisms of exclusion.

We argue that the “quality” of data is fundamentally relational. Care plays an ambivalent role, simultaneously enabling access to rights and disciplining migrant lives by standardising narratives and producing normative expectations of legitimacy. In this sense, regularisation procedures operate as a continuum of control that extends carceral logics beyond prisons and detention centres into everyday bureaucratic encounters.

By conceptualising the case file as a socio-technical and affective assemblage,this paper contributes to transnational debates on carcerality, highlighting how governance is enacted through documentation, care, and data practices that produce forms of confinement without walls.