Abstract

The riots by detainees in French administrative detention centers, which have over the past years remained classified, attracted media attention on the occasion of the fire at the Vincennes center in June, 2008. They bear witness at once to both the consequences of the growing repression against illegalized foreigners and the weak means of defense and exterior support available to detainees. In effect, these foreigners are the victims of an institutional violence exacerbated by techniques of arrest, the management of centers, and finally expulsion. This brutalization, defended by public authorities, contaminates relations to the foreigner, particularly in the world of labor, and translates into a pressure on public agents for the detection and denunciation of the « undocumented ». In the face of this repression, the detainees, who contest the legitimacy of such treatment, have no other choice but self-mutilization, suicide or, when they achieve unity, collective hunger strikes in order to oppose their deportation. Their associative and defensive supports are increasingly criminalized. Yet they still represent an avant-garde in the defence of individual and public freedoms against the encroachments made by the culture of control and deregulation. The police battle against illegal aliens is nothing but a Trojan Horse in a war against the minorities of the South and civil society as a whole