This presentation critically examines the often idealised representation of Portugal as a hospitable country for migrants, in contrast to the silenced realities of its violent detention and deportation systems. The tragic death of Ihor Homeniuk in March 2020 brought to light the violent nature of border control and the machinery of detention and deportation, previously little discussed and questioned in the public and academic domains.

The evidence I will share in this presentation, obtained by piecing together fragmented and often inconsistent data from different sources, albeit limited, offers a snapshot of the regime of detention and deportation of people racialised as migrants in Portugal. The omissions, absences and "loud silences" that emerge from this analysis, along with the omission of the intricate links between the country's colonial history and the contemporary migration industry - or to put it another way, "the making of migration" (Tazzioli, 2020), are essential components in ensuring the functioning of the border regime in Portugal, contributing to what I call a policy of organised forgetting. This policy obscures the daily reality of the violence that takes place at the hands of the state in the name of controlling its borders (external and internal) and its colonial roots, making it difficult to address these issues publicly. It also reinforces the perception of Portugal's exceptionalism in the face of "migration management", perpetuating the racial hierarchies and violence on which the national social order has historically been built.

Moderator: Joana Sousa Ribeiro (CES)
 

Bio note
Francesca Esposito completed her PhD in Community Psychology at ISPA-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa in 2019, and was subsequently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford and a lecturer at the University of Westminster in London. She is currently a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Her work focuses on the detention and deportation of people governed as migrants in Italy, Portugal and the UK from an intersectional feminist and abolitionist perspective. Francesca is Associate Director of Border Criminologies (University of Oxford) and is a member of several groups and collectives, including the feminist social co-operative BeFree (Rome, Italy). She has worked for several years with women survivors of gender-based violence, including illegalised women in detention.

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