Inside the Bureaucracy of Immigration Detention: Disgust, Contempt, and Humiliation

Join us for a hybrid discussion with Alethia Fernández de la Reguera about her new book, Inside the Bureaucracy of Immigration Detention: Disgust, Contempt, and Humiliation (Routledge, 2026), with Mary Bosworth, Andriani Fili, and Melanie Griffiths as discussants. 

Date: 4 November 2026 (Wednesday) 

Time: 17:00 - 18:00 (UK) / 11:00-12:00 (Mexico City) 

Venue: Hybrid - Centre for Criminology Seminar Room / Online 

Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork along Mexico’s southern border, this book examines the subjective dimensions of immigration policy implementation at Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest immigration detention centre. Through an institutional ethnography of immigration officials, it explores how their emotions, fears, desires, and everyday practices shape the enactment of state power and migrants’ experiences of detention. The book reveals how officials’ subjectivities are themselves shaped by institutional processes and unequal relations of power, contributing to the everyday reproduction of humiliation, contempt, and domination within an increasingly carceral immigration system.

In conversation with the author, the discussants will reflect on the emotional and relational dimensions of immigration detention and bureaucratic power, and what ethnographic attention to state officials can reveal about the workings of contemporary border regimes. A Q&A session with the audience will follow. 

Author 

Alethia Fernández de la Reguera is Departmental Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Oxford. Her research examines border militarisation, immigration detention, gender, bureaucracies, and migration from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. 

Discussants 

Mary Bosworth is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and founder and Co-Director of Border Criminologies. Her international and comparative research examines prisons, immigration detention and deportation, with particular attention to the experiences of staff and incarcerated people. 

Andriani Fili is a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, and Co-Director of Border Criminologies. Her research focuses on immigration detention in Greece, including institutional violence, resistance, and the role and experience of healthcare within and beyond detention. 

Melanie Griffiths is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham. A social scientist specialising in immigration and asylum, her research examines immigration enforcement, detention and deportation, and the emotional dimensions of migration and border control.