Negociating the Border. Independent Legal Counsel in a French Immigration Detention Centre

Based on a series of ethnographical observations carried out in a French immigration detention centre where undocumented foreigners await their deportation, this contribution describes the work of lawyers from French Human Rights organisation CIMADE who daily provide detained foreigners with legal counsel. The article first shows how these lawyers master immigration law, and use it as a strategic resource in order to legally challenge the detainees' deportation orders. It then draws to the contribution of this legal activism to the differential management of illegal immigration. Each intervention of the CIMADE lawyers indeed supposes to re-examine the judicial and physical "border" separating deportable foreigners from those who may be legalized - but it re-produces and re-enacts it at the same time.