Covid-19 and Border Control

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak, the Border Criminologies team, along with others around the globe, has expressed reiterated concerns about the impact of the pandemic on the wellbeing of migrants, in particular on those who are undocumented and/or held in detention centres. Border Criminologies is currently working with local NGOs, activists, lawyers, students, academics, and people who have experienced detention, to gather detailed, grassroots information about measures that have been taken at the national and local level to protect the rights of people in immigration detention since the Covid-19 outbreak. We have come up with a series of questions, which we invite people to answer. You can find these questions in English, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish & Greek here. You can email us information, photos, testimonies at bordercrim@law.ox.ac.uk or you can enter it directly on our interactive map, Landscapes of Border Control. We have also invited all those who are either studying, working within, or have first-hand experience of border zones, detention sites, hotspots, asylum seekers reception facilities, to join our call for blogposts on border control and Covid-19. We welcome pieces from researchers doing empirical work in these contexts, activists, practitioners and people with lived experiences of border control. We are loking forward to hearing from you.