Belgium: visit in the closed detection centers
Belgium: visit in the closed detection centers
Through this narrative, he reflects on what this carceral dispositif reveals about the role of detention centers in migration policy and the broader border regime.
“Closed centers are not an exception; they are the culmination of an ordinary policy of sorting, exclusion, and deterrence.”
If it is already barely bearable to spend an hour visiting such places, one can hardly imagine the scale of the impact that detention has on all those forced to spend weeks or months there under the threat of expulsion.
DOWN WITH CLOSED CENTERS DOWN WITH THE STATE AND BORDERS FREEDOM FOR EVERYONE
A few days ago, I was asked to visit a young Palestinian exile detained for a month at the closed center of Steenokkerzeel (127 bis), after being arrested as he was leaving a pro-Palestine gathering on Place de la Bourse, in the very center of Brussels. This request was explicitly addressed to me as a social sciences researcher working on (anti-)migration dispositifs. The purpose of the visit was to document not only his trajectory and the reasons for his arrest, but also the concrete conditions of detention in one of the central spaces of Belgium’s system for controlling foreigners.
The 127 bis center in Steenokkerzeel is not simply a carceral architecture; it is literally a dispositif—an assemblage of practices, discourses, and techniques intended to make a certain population visible, controllable, and governable: foreigners, undocumented people, the undesirable. Set in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of Zaventem airport, the complex is wedged between the tarmac, the main road, and empty fields. The constant coming and going of planes taking off and landing shapes the soundscape—an ironic reminder of the freedom to circulate reserved for others, and a constant echo of the threat of imminent expulsion.
I have, of course, known these spaces for years—at least in theory: I have studied them, analyzed them in my research. I have also demonstrated in front of them dozens of times, shouted my rage at their gates, waited with others for silhouettes to appear at the windows. Fifteen years ago, during a demonstration in front of the Vottem center, the heavy green metal door was, for once, left low enough to climb over, and the internal gate gave way under collective pressure, revealing for a few minutes the inside of the courtyard and the faces behind the bars. That moment of breach, torn from the logic of control, carried a subversive intensity: a contact, an exchange of glances across the border. We entered the yard, exchanged a few words, a few gestures with the detainees, before all being arrested. It was a moment of rupture, almost of celebration for the young activist I was—a collective irruption into a space the state ordinarily strives to keep out of sight, a crack opened in a confinement dispositif designed never to be crossed.
Today I experienced the reverse version: the inside under control, access administered, hospitality regulated. I thus entered a closed center “legally” for the first time. I hesitate even to say “entered,” as the term sounds cynical in a place specifically designed to prevent any exit. One does not enter a closed center: one dissolves into it, step by step, even as a visitor. Three layers of barriers, identity cards to present, a metal detector, a ban on phones or pens. A kind of inverted ritual of humiliation, in which the visitor submits to an access discipline, a reduction of their capacity to observe, to write, to remember. It is a space that neutralizes, even before contact, any possibility of a free gaze.
That day, three people being visited, five visitors. The visiting room—a container of about sixty square meters—condenses the panoptic logic of the institution. Four cameras, two guards. Visitors sit on one side of the table, with their backs to the guards; detainees sit facing them, always with the guards in their field of vision—a silent reminder of the hierarchy of bodies and gazes. A table-length as an administrative border. A suffocated atmosphere, as if the air itself were under surveillance. Everything is arranged to prevent intimacy, complicity, or any affective circulation: low ceilings, muffled voices, a faint but constant background hum. As if speaking too loudly might open a crack in the fiction of control. The guards, by contrast, laugh loudly, as if mocking the discretion imposed on our voices—laughing loudly, as if to remind us that lightness is not forbidden to them. This spatial dispositif does not merely organize surveillance; it produces a moral asymmetry. The visited person becomes the object of a voice that must stay low, off to the side, under the gaze of power. The visitor, forced into discretion, becomes despite himself part of this theater of control.
From where I sit, I can see only a piece of sky through the windows, two-thirds covered. A beige sky, typically Belgian, without promise. Below, two rows of barbed wire. The green fence. More cameras. From where I sit, the world exists only in two colors: the green of metal and the gray of air.
“It’s not a prison,” people often say to soften the truth. This sentence is accurate in at least one sense: in “camps for foreigners”—the words are cold, but the violence burns—people are confined without trial, without a defined term, without a horizon. A machine for suspending time, for rendering the future hypothetical. Waiting is its main technique of domination—a temporality with no end, indefinitely extendable, without judicial framework, without clear outcome.
Sitting across from me is H., this young Palestinian man of 21 (almost twenty years younger than me). His face undoubtedly bears traces of detention—slightly thinner, drawn features—but still that of a very young man, full of softness: bright eyes, neatly trimmed beard, a timid, discreet smile, restrained but real, clearly happy to receive a visit. I listen to him tell his story, but in a space where nothing lends itself to it—surveilled, noisy, constrained—I almost feel embarrassed to occupy these few minutes of intimacy he should have had with his partner, whom I accompanied to visit him. A youth that could seem ordinary if it hadn’t already been marked by too many exiles. From Gaza, which he left more than two years ago by way of Egypt, then Turkey, then a crossing to Greece. In Greece, he obtained protection status, worked in agriculture, before being cheated by his employer—with no recourse, no salary. So he left again, for Belgium, where an uncle lives. Arriving in Brussels, he worked in a restaurant, began DJ training, made friends, met a partner, started building a life. He also took part in the daily gatherings at Place de la Bourse in support of Palestine, his country ravaged by a genocide whose scale we all know. It was there, in late September, that he was arrested for no apparent reason as he left with his girlfriend.
Since then, he has been locked up. Not in a place, but in a suspension. A space where nothing moves forward, where each day could be the same, where the horizon is administratively blank. He also tells me about Mahmoud, his 26-year-old friend, also Palestinian, arrested under the same conditions, who took his own life in the same center a few days after his incarceration. The words hang in the air, crushed by the drone of the ventilation system and the ambient murmur. Like many others, H. is what is called a “Dublined” person: threatened with expulsion to Greece, the country where his fingerprints were taken. A country where he no longer knows anyone, where he never had a home, and of which he retains memories of violence, deception, ordinary racism. But he has no intention of returning. He says it plainly: what he wants is to stay here. Here, where he works, where he loves, where he sees a future. Expulsion would not be a return but an imposed uprooting. He is not asking for an exception—only to stay where he already lives. H. is here; H. is from here!
As I left the center, I thought I would feel anger. Instead, it was shame that dominated. Not abstract or moral shame, but political shame: the shame of belonging to a society that produces and administers such spaces, fully aware of their deadly causes and effects. A society that created this: rooms without light, separating tables, guards’ laughter, overhanging cameras. Shame at the bureaucracy that turned human suffering into procedure, exile into fault, and solidarity into an offense.
In this place, state xenophobia is not only visible; it is palpable: in the weight of the doors, the gaze of the guards, the neutralization of gesture, the distancing of bodies. Here, everything contributes to producing the foreigner as a figure of radical alterity, as a non-citizen, a non-person. What these walls and green fences do is precisely that: they manufacture foreignness. They turn situated, rooted lives into files to be transferred and bodies to be expelled.
Faced with this cold machinery, what remains? Perhaps, as always, the cry—the one we shout in front of the gates of shame during demonstrations. Perhaps also the need to write, to bear witness, to document this banality of administrative violence. But beyond denunciation, we must think about the continuity between these spaces of confinement and the entire migratory system. Closed centers are not exceptions; they are the culminating points of an ordinary policy of sorting, exclusion, and deterrence. The centers materialize what Belgian and European asylum and migration policy produces in its negative space (that is, less visibly but continuously): an internal, diffuse border, no longer located only at the geographic edges of Europe, but extended into the very interior of cities, institutions, and the law. This border is not only barbed wire. It also resides in files, procedures, police controls, administrative statuses, and legal categories that decide who may circulate, who may work, who may love, who may stay, and who must disappear from view.
Finally, one can simply affirm that this necropolitical machinery is not a fatality and recall simple words: Papers for all. Abolition of closed centers. Freedom of movement.
These are not naïve slogans. They are antidotes to the shame one feels near a closed center.
Freedom for H. Freedom for all those imprisoned!