Arresting (non)Citizenship: the policing migration nexus of nationality, race and criminalization

Blog post by Alpa Parmar. Alpa is Associate Director of Border Criminologies, University of Oxford. This is the thrid instalment in the themed series on Policing, Migration and National Identity.

In policing, legal and normative limits are crucial, yet discretionary powers govern street level interactions, remarks Didier Fassin.  It is unsurprising then, that uncovering and understanding the duality of these practices in policing (of rules alongside discretionary behaviour), continues to preoccupy academic researchers. My paper presents findings from an ongoing research project which examines the nature and consequences of collaboration between the police and immigration enforcement in the UK, with a focus on Operation Nexus. Operation Nexus, was rolled out in 2012 across England and Wales and in operational terms involves placing immigration officers in police custody suites. This is done so that suspected foreign national offenders can be subject to enhanced immigration status checks from the time that they are booked in to police custody. For custody suites which do not have an immigration officer physically present at all times, channels of communication with immigration have been renewed. Police officers may contact ‘nexus hub’ police stations to confirm a suspect’s immigration status and initiate deportation proceedings, if appropriate. Operation Nexus is only supposed to be fully engaged if the suspect meets the criteria of ‘high harm’. However, I found that this attribution, given the vague and pliable definition of ‘high harm’, was arbitrary and disproportionately applied more often to visible minority ethnic groups.

Symbolically, Operation Nexus has revitalized the relationship between the police and immigration, which has long been experienced, feared and contested by migrant communities in Britain. I was interested in who was targeted under the aegis of Operation Nexus and with what consequences. Some of the questions I explored included: who was suspected as foreign and which markers were applied to ascertain foreignness? How did Operation Nexus intersect with broader racial bordering practices that were being enacted in Britain? Did established practices of police profiling intersect with the aims of immigration control? How did the collaboration between police officers and immigration officers work in practice?

To examine these questions, I carried out observations, interviews, document and visual analysis across selected police custody suites in the South of England. I collated a vast range of data about formal and informal policing migration practices. Through the fieldwork, I inevitably developed deeper questions about the relationship between policework and citizenship, public expectations of the police and immigration service, what it means to belong to a country and how bonds with nationality can be impacted by interactions with the police and immigration services.

Lerman and Weaver’s thesis in Arresting Citizenship, suggests that contact with the criminal justice system can fundamentally recast the relationship between citizens and the state. Drawing on this, I argue that when the police are enlisted to carry out the dual function of delineating who belongs, alongside suspecting who might be an offender, the collateral consequence is that all racialized groups are treated as automatically suspect. So, if you are a visible ethnic minority, whether a citizen or without citizenship, due to the practical and symbolic reach of Operation Nexus, you may more likely be assumed to be an offender and foreign, because of the practical and symbolic reach of Operation Nexus. My research findings suggested that visual cues, offending histories and intelligence were employed by the police as markers to decide who required immigration status checks. The decision to check someone or not was largely discretionary, capricious and at times provided a means of professional reward or sense of control for police. In their day to day practice, officers described how they felt strongly governed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which entailed following strict procedures when a suspect was brought into police custody. This was in contrast to the absence of a clear approach for performing immigration checks to ensure fair and equitable treatment, and led to practices of racialized discretion.

In the paper I describe how police intelligence briefings circulated in meetings reified the relationship between nationality and crime, and extended ideas about nationality acting as a signal for potential criminality. My argument is that such practices, embedded in the policy of Operation Nexus, represent an extension of colonial thinking about race and crime, and practices of categorization towards ‘racial difference’ developed during the height of the British empire. Such thinking advanced (and continues to advance) the claim that foreignness and crime are inherently linked and that foreigners, despite having immigration rights and legitimate connections to England, should be treated with an inexorable air of suspicion. My findings also underscore the collateral and far-reaching negative consequences of schemes such as Operation Nexus. For example, the explicit collaboration between the police and immigration had the effect of minority ethnic groups adapting their behaviour because they would expect to be questioned about their citizenship status when stopped by the police, which had a lasting impact on their sense of identity and belonging to the UK. I argue that these findings connect with Lerman and Weaver’s concept of people being ‘free but not free’ as I found that visible racial minorities, in the face of criminal justice interactions, underwent a ‘reorganization of racial knowledge’. In other words, they acknowledged that if you belong to a visible minority ethnic group, you are likely to be treated unfairly by the state. By bringing two of the most powerful symbols of the state together - the police and immigration, to the extent that it is difficult to decipher whether the police are immigration or immigration are the police, both citizens and foreign nationals were made to feel disenfranchised and some underwent in a process of ‘unbelonging’ towards Britain because of their encounters with the police and immigration. 

Since writing the paper, I have been tracking the journey of a number of Operation Nexus cases and gathering research through attending immigration tribunals and appeals that rely on police intelligence to initiate deportation proceedings. I have also been conducting life history interviews with defendants who are currently subject to Operation Nexus proceedings. As I write this post, a group of fifty Jamaican born people are due to be deported from the UK to Jamaica because of their previous criminal convictions, reported to include drug offences, burglary, rape and other violent crimes. Whilst criminal convictions for serious offences undoubtedly need to be dealt with appropriately, such cases underscore that the use of banishment as an extension of punishment continues unabated. This is despite the promises made by the government following the Windrush Scandal which exposed the uneven and racialized consequences of the deportation of ‘foreign national criminals’. The recent mass deportation to Jamaica is likely to have included people whose cases relied on the police’s initial charging decisions and intelligence gathering procedures, referrals and checks with immigration. They will also have involved designations of ‘high harm’ through the practices endorsed by collaborative work between the police and immigration enforcement as described above. The two-tier system of punishment if you are deemed ‘foreign’ is clearly exposed by schemes such as Operation Nexus which arguably operate to reinvigorate and (re)embed colonial based ideas about racial hierarchies and criminality that render some people always ‘foreign’. 

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Parmar, A. (2020). Arresting (non)Citizenship: the policing migration nexus of nationality, race and criminalization. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/03/arresting [date]