Immigration Detainee Escorting

This project, supported by the British Academy and the University of Oxford John Fell Fund, is the first independent academic study of immigration detainee escorting in the UK.  This system is wholly contracted out by the Home Office to a single private company – currently Mitie, Care & Custody, who run it as two distinct, yet overlapping and interconnected endeavours: in-country escorting (ICE) and overseas escorting (OSE). While ICE detainee custody officers move people around the country in secure vans and confine them in sites of short-term detention, OSE staff enforce their expulsion from UK territory.

Since July 2019, I have conducted research in secure vans, planes, and sites of short-term detention. During the Covid-19 lockdowns I observed daily meetings between the private contractor and the Home Office.  Through observations, informal conversations and interviews with staff and a staff survey, together with analysis of files, handbooks, statutory rules, parliamentary debates, and population statistics, I document the banal, everyday nature of this border control logistics system. 

Staff Culture Report 

Staff Survey 

Mary Bosworth (In Press, 2024). Supply Chain Justice and the Logistics of British Border Control. Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Mary Bosworth and Lucia Zedner (Eds.). 2022. Privatising Border Control: Law at the Limits of the Sovereign State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mary Bosworth. 2024. ‘Border Control and the Degradation of Labour’, British Journal of Criminology.  64(1): 124 – 138.

Mary Bosworth (forthcoming, 2025). ‘Immigration detention and deportation in the UK during Covid’, in F. Esposito, T. Degenhardt, and A. Lindberg (Eds.). Detention and Deportation in Europe: Envisioning Abolitionist Futures in the Aftermath of COVID-19. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Mary Bosworth and Samuel Singler. (2022). ‘A mundane spectacle? (In)visibility, normalisation and the state in the UK migrant escorting contract’ in M. Bosworth and L. Zedner. (Eds.). Privatising Border Control: Law at the limits of the sovereign state, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 170 – 188.

2024, Feb 6, Bureaucracy, Violence and Border Control in Britain, Centre for Criminology.

Past events

2023. ‘Immigration escorts and short-term detention at the border’, HM Inspectorate of Prisons. 13 December 2023.

2023. ‘What to make of (border) violence’, John LI. Edwards Annual Lecture, Centre for Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies, University of Toronto, 2 November 2023.

2023. ‘Administering Violence at the UK Border,’ European Society of Criminology, Florence, 8 September 2023.

2023. ‘Time, failure and logistics in UK border control’, Hebrew University, 16 March 2023.

2023, ‘Ethics and research in immigration detention’, University of Oslo, 27 February 2023.

2022. ‘Forces of Detention’, Association of Visitors to Immigration Detention, Online, 19 October 2022.

2022. ‘Logistics and UK Border Control’, University of Oslo, September 2022