Inside Mexico’s immigration detention system

Dr Alethia Fernández de la Reguera, Departmental Lecturer in Criminology at the Faculty of Law, has published a new book examining the workings of immigration detention in Mexico.

Inside the Bureaucracy of Immigration Detention: Disgust, Contempt, and Humiliation, published by Routledge, presents findings from Dr Fernández de la Reguera’s extensive fieldwork at Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest immigration detention centre, situated on its southern border with Guatemala. The book investigates how subjective aspects of immigration officials’ work, such as their emotions and ways of reasoning, inform the exercise of state power and the experiences of detained migrants.

The research explores how institutional processes and unequal power relations affect both officials and migrants, contributing to practices of humiliation, contempt and domination within the immigration detention system.

The book was launched at an event hosted by the Centre for Criminology and Border Criminologies on 4 November. Dr Fernández de la Reguera was joined in discussion by Professor Mary Bosworth (Centre for Criminology) and Dr Melanie Griffiths (University of Birmingham) to explore the emotional and relational dimensions of immigration detention and bureaucratic power.