A woman crosses into Syria from Turkey through the Kassab crossing on December 27, 2024. Aaref Watad/AFP via Getty Images
Wrapped in blankets and clutching their children and possessions, they waited in anticipation, some having camped overnight by the barriers.
Turkish government and pro-government media quickly hailed these scenes as a humanitarian milestone after a 13-year war. Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced at the border that over 52,000 Syrians had “voluntarily, safely, and honorably” returned—his words reflecting the official narrative of dignified return. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, addressing the nation, added, “As Syria gains more stability, God willing, voluntary, safe and honorable returns will increase.”
On the surface, the occasion appeared to mark a celebratory end to displacement, a final tableau of relief and resolution. Yet, behind this carefully staged tableau lies a coercive infrastructure of refugee deportations that has been years in the making, legally codified, digitally surveilled and internationally subsidized.
Migrant deportation in Turkey is not a deviation from legal order but one of its core functions: a mode of governance that binds domestic authoritarianism to transnational systems of migration control. Through the Law on Foreigners and International Protection (LFIP) and the Temporary Protection Regulation (TPR), Turkey has constructed a legal regime that mimics humanitarian norms while enabling mass removals based on vague criteria like “public order” or “morality.” Following the 2016 coup attempt and the ensuing legal reforms, migrant removal has become an executive tool wielded with minimal oversight.
Today, it is clear that these practices are not confined to Turkey. Across Europe, the Gulf and increasingly the United States, migration law is being redeployed to manage migrants through coercive forms of return. This shift effectively transforms return—one of the durable solutions to displacement outlined by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since the 1951 Refugee Convention—into a mechanism of punishment, containment and geopolitical leverage. What unites these regimes is the normalization of removability (through the threat of deportation) as a condition of life, especially for those who are Arab, Muslim or from the Global South. Legality in this context is neither static nor neutral but a racialized and politicized condition: Its very revocability reveals that it is contingent on state decisions on whether certain migrants are desirable or not.
Expanding Infrastructures of Deportation
The expansion of Turkey’s deportation infrastructure is an outcome of intertwined national reforms and international incentives. Following the passage of the Law on Foreigners and International Protection (LFIP) in 2013 and the Temporary Protection Regulation (TPR) in 2014, Turkey established an asylum framework that, unlike most states in Southwest Asia, formally codified rights to asylum and international protection. The LFIP outlines procedures for refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, while the TPR introduces a collective protection regime specifically for Syrians arriving after 2011.
These laws were widely celebrated by EU institutions as signs of Turkey’s progress toward entering the European Union. But in practice, they also established a vast discretionary enforcement regime. The LFIP authorizes deportation for a wide range of administrative violations, including overstaying a visa or failing to maintain valid residence documentation.[1] Deportation can be initiated not on the basis of a criminal conviction, but for broadly defined threats to “public order,” “public morality” or “national security.”[2] Articles 33–35 and 50 of the TPR impose strict reporting duties on Syrians, including address registration, income disclosure and the collection and international sharing of personal and biometric data. Non-compliance can lead to legal sanctions, loss of protection and forced relocation.
After the 2017 constitutional referendum, the Presidency of Migration Management (PMM), formerly the Directorate of Migration Management, was placed directly under the president’s office, consolidating executive control over migrant registration, detention and deportation. In 2018, the Turkish Grand National Assembly passed a law further amending the LFIP to permit deportations based on alleged links to terrorism and restrict legal safeguards, including lawyer access and attorney-client confidentiality.
These reforms directly undermined protections formally codified in LFIP Article 55 and TPR Article 6. Both articles had enshrined the principle of non-refoulement (prohibiting forcible return to a country deemed unsafe) in line with Turkey’s international obligations according to the UN Refugee Convention and European Convention on and Human Rights. Removal decisions are easily issued by provincial directorates of migration management under the Ministry of the Interior, often in coordination with centrally appointed governors.
While deportation orders can still be appealed in administrative court, judicial independence has been severely weakened since the post-coup purges of thousands of judges and prosecutors, and courts often defer to executive priorities. As a result, these legal protections are routinely bypassed by provincial migration authorities and security forces, with courts rarely intervening even in cases involving clear violations.
This domestic legal apparatus cannot be divorced from Turkey’s evolving entanglement with European migration and border control policies. Since Turkey’s EU candidacy was granted in 1999, Turkey has faced sustained pressure to align its asylum and border governance with European priorities. Between 2011 and 2023, the European Union disbursed nearly €10 billion to Turkey for migration governance, with the 2016 EU–Turkey Statement marking a pivotal shift in this alignment: In exchange for €6 billion in aid, Turkey agreed to contain Syrian refugees within its territory, accept returns from the European Union and expand its deportation and detention infrastructure.
By 2021, European institutions had officially designated Turkey as a safe third country, allowing the European Union to send asylum seekers back to Turkey, despite mounting evidence of coercive returns. Meanwhile, nearly €1 billion was given to Turkey specifically to help manage the flow of people across its borders, with over €213 million allocated for the construction and maintenance of removal centers.
In the ensuing years, biometric surveillance has intensified. In 2022, Turkey launched a National Biometric Data Management System that stores fingerprints, iris scans and facial recognition data for both citizens and non-citizens. Migration Control teams now conduct routine ID checks in metro stations, bus terminals and markets. These records feed into GöçNet, an EU-supported digital surveillance system, that provides real-time access to field enforcement units. In 2023 alone, over 286,000 people were subjected to on-the-spot checks; more than 61,000 were funneled into deportation proceedings, often without access to legal counsel or interpretation.
Removal centers have become the backbone of this system. In 2015, Turkey operated a dozen facilities with 2,980 beds. By 2022, there were over 30 centers across 13 provinces, with 20,540 beds, surpassing the combined detention capacity of the entire European Union. These centers not only process deportations, but function as legal gray zones. Human rights groups and the Turkish Bar Association report routine coercion, especially forced signatures on voluntary return forms under threat of violence or separation.
In 2022, the PMM reported 119,817 deportations and boasted a 70 percent deportation-to-apprehension “success rate,” claiming it was seven times higher than the EU average.[3] In 2025, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya declared that no other country matched Turkey’s biometric infrastructure or “deportation efficiency,” praising mobile fingerprinting vans and centralized digital registries as emblems of national “security leadership.”[4]
Together, these developments reveal that Turkey’s deportation regime is neither accidental nor exceptional; it is the outcome of deliberate legal engineering, institutional centralization and transnational incentives. Built on the scaffolding of the LFIP and TPR, the system grants sweeping discretionary powers to governors, migration authorities and law enforcement, enabling removal not only for administrative violations but for vaguely defined threats to public order or morality. From biometric surveillance and mass ID checks to the expansion of removal centers, deportation has become both a bureaucratic routine and a spectacle of state power, legitimized by the very legal and humanitarian frameworks once celebrated as progress.
The Everyday Life of Removability
During my ethnographic fieldwork between 2017 and 2023 in migrant-led community centers and human rights organizations in Istanbul and border towns across southeastern and northwestern Turkey, I observed how Turkey’s increasingly centralized and discretionary deportation regime was routinely leveraged by migration officials, police and provincial governors to justify the targeting of urban poor, LGBTQ+ individuals and politically active refugees.
In 2019, Istanbul’s then-governor Ali Yerlikaya (now Minister of Interior) announced that all Syrians unregistered in the city would be expelled. Police launched sweeping operations in working-class neighborhoods, detaining over 6,000 refugees within 12 days. While official statements referred to “repatriation centers,” many were quietly deported across the border. Human rights organizations documented forced signatures on “voluntary return forms.” Some were denied the chance to read the forms they were coerced into signing. Others were beaten or threatened with never seeing their families again if they refused to comply.
This system of punitive mobility intensified in early 2020. Amid escalating tensions with the European Union and domestic outrage over Turkish military casualties in Idlib, President Erdoğan declared Turkey’s land border with Greece open. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands were bused to Edirne, a border city in northwestern Turkey, bordering Greece and Bulgaria, often without clear consent or information. In an effort to pressure Europe into security and aid concessions, migrants were forced into movement and then corralled by riot police, detained in isolated quarantine camps or involuntarily transferred to removal centers. Journalists, academics and NGOs attempting to document and assist migrants at the border reported harassment and obstruction from authorities, hindering their efforts to provide humanitarian assistance.
But the public spectacle is only one form of control. Turkish migration authorities and security forces have also enacted more insidious mechanisms to entrap migrants in legal and territorial limbo. Nadira, a Syrian woman I met in Istanbul, recounted how her brother-in-law was detained while commuting from Istanbul to his job, despite having a valid registration appointment in Bursa, a city just a couple of hours away. Under the TPR, such inter-provincial movement without permission violates legal conditions. He was denied legal counsel, pressured to sign a voluntary return form and deported. “He’s gone,” Nadira texted me. “His wife and children are left without a breadwinner.” In subsequent failed attempts to return to his family, he faced extortion by smugglers and arrests in Syria. As Elana Zilberg writes in the context of Central American migrants, such spiraling cycles of removal and return represent “forced transnationality”—where return is not a resolution but a recursive violence.[5]
Moreover, these tactics do not only target Syrians. In 2022, over 66,000 Afghans were deported, often without due process. Afghan men were beaten until they signed voluntary return forms. A former special forces commander was deported overland through Iran in 2023 and executed by the Taliban.
For these refugees who should be legally protected from forced return deportation is a renewed act of violence. For others who remain, it governs the architecture of daily life. Migrants learn to self-regulate by avoiding certain buses, staying indoors or keeping ID documents taped inside clothing, knowing that deportation may come not with a raid, but from a landlord’s or employer’s tip-off, a mismatch in address registration or a missing biometric update.
In Istanbul neighborhoods like Sultanbeyli and Esenyurt, I observed how displaced communities from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen adapted to these conditions: shaving beards, adopting local hairstyles, suppressing native language in public and avoiding hospitals unless critically ill. One Afghan woman explained that she feared her undocumented husband would be detained at the hospital entrance if she went into labor there. A Syrian woman, fearing moral judgment and bureaucratic scrutiny that might have led to her deportation, chose to have an abortion at an unlicensed refugee-initiated clinic. Their fears were not unfounded: In one case, a Syrian trans woman was deported after seeking hospital care for her undocumented partner.
Today, as Turkish authorities and pro-government media revive the language of “voluntary return” following Asad’s downfall, the fear of removal persists. It is embedded in municipal databases, digital surveillance and everyday encounters with the state.
From Istanbul to Boston
On March 25, 2025, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student on an F-1 visa, was en route to an iftar dinner in Boston when masked ICE agents apprehended her. Her alleged offense was not criminal but ideological: co-authoring a campus op-ed criticizing US foreign policy and her university’s financial ties to the Israeli military. Within hours, she was transported to a remote detention center in Louisiana.
Members of the MIT Graduate Student Union demonstrate outside the John F. Kennedy Federal Building on April 1, 2025 to demand the Trump administration cease attacks on the 1st Amendment and immediately release union members, including Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk. Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Over the next six weeks, Öztürk’s case sparked an outcry, not only among activists but across Turkish state-aligned media outlets, which framed her as a heroic victim of US repression. The irony was striking. Yeni Şafak, a pro-government newspaper condemned the US government for targeting students and academics participating in campus intifadas, citing Canadian human rights lawyer Amina Sherazee who wrote that the United States’ mask of freedom has fallen. Another pro-government newspaper Sabah condemned ICE for detaining a student “without a shred of evidence.”[6] Yet another one, Türkiye, critiqued the inhumane detention conditions of Öztürk especially referring to her severe asthma attacks.
Meanwhile, since the 2013 Gezi Park protests, Turkey has repressed dissent by deporting foreign protesters and quietly removing Uyghur refugees under pressure from China. It has also purged academics who signed the “Academics for Peace” petition, routinely targeted protesting students and faculty at universities like Boğaziçi and detained demonstrators following Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu’s arrest in March 2025—including chronically ill student Esila Ayık for holding a protest sign that read “Dictator Erdoğan.” These targets, like Öztürk, were non-criminal and yet faced serious consequences for being merely politically inconvenient.
A Vermont federal judge eventually ordered Öztürk’s release, citing both medical harm and constitutional violations. “Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in the country who, like Öztürk, are not U.S. citizens,” said Judge William K. Sessions III.[7] But Öztürk’s ordeal is far from over. Her visa remains revoked. She still faces removal. For now, she has returned to Massachusetts under community supervision, uncertain if she will be allowed to complete her PhD.
The legal architecture of post-entry social control has a long and ever-expanding history based on retroactive and indefinite scrutiny of beliefs, associations and presumed loyalties depending on ideological priorities of the United States at a given time. For example, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—originally authorizing wartime removals based on national origin—helped codify removals grounded not in individual conduct but in collective suspicion and presumed allegiance, a logic the Trump administration has recently attempted to revive. Later, the Immigration Act of 1918 enabled the detention and deportation of foreign-born people not for specific actions but for political affiliations or speech, a practice expanded during the McCarthy era to target communists and other ideological threats.[9] After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act (2001) and the REAL ID Act (2005) amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow deportation not for criminal conviction but on the government’s “reasonable ground to believe” that a person has endorsed or associated with terrorism.[10] These provisions created a regime of permanent revocability, allowing removal for beliefs or affiliations that may be illusory, decades old or formed under coercion.
More recently, Trump-era officials have wielded immigration law to discipline dissent through vague claims of foreign policy harm. In March 2025, Mahmoud Khalil—a Palestinian-born US green card holder—was detained on the rarely used grounds of activities presenting “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”[11] An immigration judge upheld the deportation order based solely on this determination, despite the absence of any criminal charges. Khalil secured a temporary stay through a federal court.
These dynamics mirror those in Turkey, where vague legal terms like “public order,” “foreign policy harm” and “reasonable belief” are similarly used to police dissent and normalize deportation. Deportation thus becomes a tool of governance to target migrants based on shifting ideological priorities. As Nyki Duda has observed, far-right and nationalist regimes increasingly rely not only on mass removals, but also on the production of unlivable conditions that compel migrants to either constantly adapt or leave. In both contexts, deportation functions less as a discrete act than as the slow attrition of rights, protections and dignity, governing not only those expelled but also those who remain.
Originally envisioned as a legal promise of restoration, from Istanbul to Boston, migrant return has been stripped of its protective function and recast as a bureaucratic choreography of removal. It is administered precisely where return remains unsafe and denied to those who have waited generations. Meanwhile, Palestinians, who have endured decades of exile under the unfulfilled promise of United Nations Resolution 194, are denied return. Their claims are not only dismissed but actively ridiculed, as in the dystopian spectacle of AI-generated “Trump Gaza” that President Trump circulated on social media.
What distinguishes the United States from Turkey, for now, is the persistence of institutional friction. Despite its flaws, the United States retains procedural layers like immigration courts, federal judicial review, media scrutiny and occasional congressional oversight. These mechanisms do not prevent the use of immigration law to punish dissent, but they can delay it, challenge it and, at times, make it visible.
[Fulya Pınar is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College.]
Endnotes
[1] LFIP Articles 54(1)(d), (h), and (i))
[2] Ibid, (LFIP Article 54(1)(d-f); TPR Article 8(1)(e)).
[3] “Sınır Dışı Sayısında Artış Devam Ediyor: 119.817 Düzensiz Göçmen Sınır Dışı Edildi,” Göç İdaresi Başkanlığı, December 12, 2022.
[4] “İçişleri Bakanı Ali Yerlikaya: ‘Türkiye, Göç Yönetiminde Dünyaya Model Ülke,’” Göç İdaresi Başkanlığı, April 16, 2025.
[5] Elana Zilberg, “Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador),” American Quarterly 56/3 (September 2004), pp. 759–779, at 762.
[6] “ABD’de, Filistin’e destek verdiği gerekçesiyle gözaltında tutulan Tufts Üniversitesi doktora öğrencisi Rümeysa Öztürk’ün temyiz davasında, hükümetin avukatları gözaltı için herhangi bir gerekçe sunamadı,” Sabah, May 6, 2025.
[7] C. J. Ciaramella, “Judge Orders Tufts Grad Student Rumeysa Ozturk Be Released on Bail from Immigration Detention,” AOL News, May 9, 2025.
[8] Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 6.
[9] Internal Security Act of 1950, §22, 64 Stat. 987.
[10] INA §212(a)(3)(B), codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1182; INA §237(a)(4)(B), codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1227.
[11] Ibid. INA § 237(a)(4)(C)(i).
