By Youri Lou Vertongen – 31 October 2025
In this text, YLV shares his account of his visit to a detention centre. He describes his experience of bodily control: ‘you don’t enter a detention centre, you dissolve into it, step by step’.
Through this account, he reflects on what this prison system reveals about the role of detention centres in migration policy and the border system more broadly.
‘Detention centres are not an exception, they are the culmination of a routine policy of sorting, exclusion and deterrence.’
If it is already difficult to bear spending an hour visiting these places, one dares not imagine the extent of the impact of detention on all those forced to spend weeks or months there, under the threat of deportation.
DOWN WITH DETENTION CENTRES
DOWN WITH STATES AND BORDERS
FREEDOM FOR ALL
A few days ago, I was asked to visit a young Palestinian exile who had been detained for a month at the Steenokkerzeel closed centre (127 bis), after being arrested as he left a rally in support of Palestine on the Place de la Bourse, in the centre of Brussels. This request was made explicitly to me as a social scientist working on (anti-)migration measures. The visit aimed to document not only his journey and the reasons for his arrest, but also the concrete conditions of detention in one of the central spaces of Belgium’s policy of controlling foreigners.
The 127 bis centre in Steenokkerzeel is not simply a prison building, it is literally a system, i.e. a set of practices, discourses and techniques designed to make a certain population – foreigners, undocumented migrants, undesirables – visible, controllable and governable. Located in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of Zaventem airport, the complex is caught between the tarmac, the national highway and empty fields. The comings and goings of planes taking off and landing provide a constant soundtrack, an ironic reminder of a freedom of movement reserved for others, but also a permanent echo of the threat of imminent deportation.
I have, of course, been familiar with these spaces for several years, at least in theory: I have studied and analysed them in some of my research. I have also demonstrated there dozens of times, shouted my rage in front of their gates, waited with others for silhouettes to appear at the windows. About fifteen years ago, during a demonstration in front of the Vottem centre, the heavy green metal door was climbed over, while the inner gate gave way under the collective pressure, allowing a glimpse, for a few minutes, of the inside of the courtyard and the faces behind the bars. This moment of intrusion, snatched from the logic of control, carried a subversive intensity: that of contact, of an exchange of glances across the border. We had invaded the courtyard, exchanged a few words and gestures with the prisoners, before being arrested en masse. It was a moment of rupture, almost a celebration for the young activist that I was, a collective irruption into a space that the state usually keeps out of sight, a breach opened in a system of confinement designed never to be crossed.
Today, I experienced the opposite: the inside under control, access managed, hospitality supervised. So I entered a closed centre ‘legally’ for the first time. I hesitate to say ‘enter’ because the term takes on a cynical tone in a place specifically designed to prevent any exit. You don’t enter a closed centre: you dissolve into it, step by step, even as a visitor. Three layers of barriers, identity cards to present, a metal detector, no telephones or pens allowed. It is a kind of reverse humiliation ritual, where visitors submit to a discipline of access, a reduction of their ability to observe, write and remember. It is a space that neutralises, even before contact, any possibility of free observation.
On that day, there were three person were visited by five visitors. The visiting room, a container measuring approximately sixty square metres, encapsulates the panoptic logic of the institution. Four cameras, two guards. Visitors sit on one side of the table, with their backs to the guards; the detainees face them, keeping them constantly in their field of vision – a silent reminder of the hierarchy of bodies and gazes. The length of the table acts as an administrative boundary. The atmosphere is stifling, as if even the air itself were under surveillance. Everything is designed to prevent any intimacy, any possible complicity, any emotional exchange: the ceilings are low, voices are hushed, almost whispered, and there is a faint but continuous murmur. It is as if speaking too loudly might breach the fiction of control. The guards, on the other hand, laugh loudly, as if mocking the forced discretion of our voices. The guards laugh loudly, as if to remind us that light-heartedness is not forbidden to them. This spatial arrangement not only organises surveillance, it also produces a moral asymmetry. The visitor becomes the subject of speech that must be kept low, at a distance, under the gaze of authority. Reduced to discretion, the visitor unwittingly becomes part of this theatre of control.
From where I am sitting, I can only see a patch of sky through the two-thirds obscured windows. A beige sky, typically Belgian, without promise. Below, two rows of barbed wire. The green fence. More cameras. From where I am sitting, the world exists in only two colours: the green of metal and the grey of the air.
‘It’s not a prison,’ people often say as a euphemism. This phrase is at least accurate in one respect: in the ‘camps for foreigners’ – the words are cold, but the violence is burning – people are locked up without trial, without a defined term and without any prospects. A machine for suspending time, for hypothesising the future. Waiting is its main technique of domination; an endless temporality, indefinitely extendable, without any legal framework, without any clear outcome.
Sitting opposite me is H., a 21-year-old Palestinian man (almost twenty years my junior). His face undoubtedly bears the marks of detention – a little thin, drawn features – but it remains that of a very young man, still full of gentleness: bright eyes, a well-groomed beard, a shy and discreet smile, as if restrained but very much present, clearly happy to receive a visitor. I listen to him tell me his story, but in a space that is not conducive to such a conversation – monitored, noisy, constrained – I feel almost embarrassed to be taking up these few minutes of privacy that he should have had with his girlfriend, whom I accompanied to come and see him. A youth that might seem ordinary if it weren’t for the many exiles he has endured. Originally from Gaza, he left more than two years ago, travelling through Egypt, then Turkey, before crossing over to Greece. In Greece, he obtained protection status and worked in agriculture before being swindled by his employer – left with no recourse and no salary. So he left again, this time for Belgium, where an uncle lives. Once in Brussels, he worked in a restaurant, began training as a DJ, made friends, met a girlfriend and started a new life. He also took part in the daily gatherings at the Brussels Stock Exchange in support of Palestine, his country ravaged by a genocide whose scale we are all aware of. It was there, at the end of September, that he was arrested for no apparent reason as he was leaving the premises with his girlfriend.
Since then, he has been locked up. Not in a place, but in limbo. A space where nothing moves forward, where every day could be the same, where the horizon is administratively empty. He also tells me about Mahmoud, his 26-year-old friend, also Palestinian, who was arrested under the same circumstances and who took his own life in the same centre a few days after his incarceration. The words hang in the air, drowned out by the hum of the visiting room’s ventilation system and the ambient hubbub. Like many others, H. is what is known as a Dubliné: threatened with deportation to Greece, the country where his fingerprints were registered. A country where he no longer knows anyone, where he has never had a home, and which he remembers for its violence, deception and everyday racism. But he has no intention of returning there. He says it bluntly: what he wants is to stay here. Here, where he works, where he loves, where he has plans for the future. Deportation would be less a return than an imposed uprooting. He is not asking for an exception, he is simply asking to be allowed to stay where he already lives. H. is here, H. belongs here!
When I left the centre, I thought I felt anger. Instead, it is a feeling of shame that dominates. Not an abstract or moral shame, but a political shame: the shame of belonging to a society that produces and administers these kinds of spaces, fully aware of their deadly causes and effects. A society that has created this: rooms without light, dividing tables, the laughter of guards, overhead cameras. Shame on the bureaucracy that has turned human suffering into procedure, exile into fault and solidarity into crime.
In this place, state xenophobia is not only visible, it is palpable: in the weight of the doors, the gaze of the guards, the neutralisation of movement, the distancing of bodies. Here, everything conspires to produce the foreigner as a figure of radical otherness, as a non-citizen, as a non-person. This is precisely what these walls and layers of green barriers do: they manufacture foreignness. They transform lives that are situated and rooted into files to be moved and bodies to be expelled.
Faced with this cold machinery, what remains? Perhaps, as always, the cry – the one we utter 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 consider the continuity between these spaces of confinement and the entire migration system. Closed centres are not exceptions; they are the culmination of an ordinary policy of sorting, exclusion and deterrence. The centres embody what Belgian and European asylum and migration policy produces in the background (i.e. in a less visible but nevertheless constant way): a diffuse internal border that is no longer located solely at the geographical limits of Europe, but has extended into cities, institutions and the law itself. This border is not just barbed wire. It also resides in files, procedures, police checks, administrative statuses and legal categories that decide who can move around, who can work, who can love, who can stay and who must disappear from view.
Finally, we can simply state that this necropolitical mechanism is not inevitable, and repeat a few simple words: Papers for all. Destruction of detention centres. Freedom of movement.
These are not naive slogans. They are antidotes to the shame we feel when we approach a detention centre.
Freedom for H.. Freedom for all those who are locked up!
YLV
