Policing the Virus: Race, Risk, and the Politics of Containment in Morocco and the United States

By Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen

In the Summer of 2020, Security in Context and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences issued a joint call for submissions on "Borders and the State in Light of Covid-19." In the coming days and weeks, we will publish selected works as part of a series on critical approaches to border studies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the intimate connections between public health  governance, border enforcement, and domestic policing across the globe. In this short  piece, I map some of these intimacies as I encountered them in the United States and  Morocco, tracing how discourses of security and spatial tactics of quarantine intersect  with the containment of racialized, gendered, and impoverished people at national  borders, in detention facilities, and in prisons. Security discourses and containment  practices converge around racialized fears of the mobile, “alien” body in foreign and  domestic space, where the body in question slides between that of the novel coronavirus  and the criminalized human (Ahmed, 2000). Closed borders, deportations, locked-down  facilities, and stay-at-home orders ostensibly aim to seal us off from disease (foreign  bodies), but in practice often seal off vulnerable people (as foreign bodies) in dangerous  environments (Beisel, 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic has touched all of us, but  whether one is quarantining from the virus or quarantining with the virus comes down  to racialized determinations of belonging and difference. Crisis—be it a global pandemic,  a refugee crisis, an urban crime wave, or an economic recession—and attendant  reactions to draw lines, lock doors, or build walls rehearse repertoires of culpability,  disposability, and (in)humanity that jeopardize the security and well-being of us all. 

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Since 2016, I have conducted research on migration and border enforcement in  Moroccan cities, focusing on how European policies enroll Morocco’s participation as a  country-wide container for “black” migrants as they move through Morocco en route to  Europe. I have argued that border fences and militarized sea patrols between North Africa and Europe are the more spectacular dimensions of a racial border that also  contains migrant people in urban space through abandonment, indebtedness, and  destitution (Gross-Wyrtzen, 2020). The pandemic has made migrant people’s situations more desperate, and strict lockdowns across the country (preventing any movement outside the home without a notarized pass) have further invisiblized their plight. Many  migrants and refugees depend upon begging for survival; restrictions on movement in public space have emptied city streets, leaving them without means for subsistence. Meanwhile, to comply with quarantine orders, NGOs that provide food or medical assistance ceased or severely restricted their operations. Migrant women, who are often bound to countrymen through patronage relationships or trafficking arrangements, were made especially precarious. A Nigerian friend reported that her partner and others in the home verbally and physically abused her, but for the first four months she could not step outside to escape, even for a few minutes. At the same time, local and national police continued border enforcement operations, raiding and destroying migrant  encampments, actions that made migrant people more vulnerable to arrest or deportation for violating orders to “stay home.” In June, in the Western Saharan city of Laayoune, police raided homes and workplaces, rounding up more than 50 migrant  people, forcibly testing them for COVID-19, and then confining them to an empty school building without running water, food, or clothing for more than a week while awaiting results. 

Despite severe restrictions on movement within the country, thousands of migrants  have launched boats from North African shores in an attempt to reach Europe via the  Canary Islands or the Mediterranean Sea (and in at least one case, Moroccan migrants  stranded in Spain have attempted the reverse trip). Citing fear of the virus, European  countries closed their ports, and rescue boats ceased to operate for the first two months;  when rescues resumed, Greece, Italy and Malta refused to admit those rescued, causing  weeks-long standoffs and in one case, six suicide attempts by refugees and migrants  held on board a humanitarian vessel. 

At home in New Haven, Connecticut, I have spent the past year and a half volunteering  among people experiencing incarceration or immigration detention, populations that  are disproportionately drawn from Black, “Hispanic,” and Indigenous communities  (Sakala, 2014). The pandemic caused the lockdown of prisons and jails across the  United States, halting family visits and volunteer-run programs, and delaying court  dates by months. In April, as the virus picked up speed, the Connecticut Department of Corrections (DOC) transferred 183 COVID-positive prisoners to punitive isolation units at Northern Correctional, just weeks after the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture had publicly criticized Connecticut’s widespread and inappropriate use of  solitary confinement. Calls from activists and medical professionals to  decarcerate led to the release of 1,455 people who the DOC deemed to pose a “low  threat” to public safety, but the closure of homeless shelters, halfway houses, and  treatment centers coupled with the transition to online-only health services meant many  of those released remained at risk for contracting the disease or in otherwise life threatening circumstances. 

On May 1, as the virus spread uncontrolled through Connecticut’s prisons (in part due to  the late and under-enforced requirement of DOC employees to wear masks and practice  social distancing), DOC closed showering facilities in all central housing units across the state. People inside continued to sleep in dormitory-style rooms with less than six feet  distance between them and their neighbors; prisoner-workers and DOC employees  circulated around the facilities without adequate protective equipment. The Connecticut  Bail Fund, which established a hotline for Connecticut inmates and immigrant detainees  held in a nearby Bristol, Massachusetts prison, received hundreds of reports by callers  regarding lack of hygiene and protective supplies (soap, masks, cleaning supplies), the  failure to test DOC employees and prisoners for COVID, and the requirement of  symptomatic people to continue reporting for their prison jobs (Connecticut Bail Fund  Hotline Volunteers, 2020). 

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As Stuart Hall et al. (1978) have written, crisis—and discourses that manufacture or  shape the contours of crisis—provides the state new openings and enhanced legitimacy  to exert its raw, violent power against social Others. Like Sara Ahmed, Hall  demonstrates how particular framings— in this case, “muggings” in the United  Kingdom—index a host of meanings that include “the race conflict, the urban crisis,  rising crime; the breakdown of ‘law and order’” and so on (Hall et al. 1978, 27). The  figure haunting UK moral panics around mugging was a Black or immigrant young man,  reified through policing practices (being “on the lookout for ‘colored young men’”) and  through media narratives linking riskiness to blackness or foreignness (ibid., 27). Today,  the “flood of refugees” in Europe, Trump’s “invasion of Central American gangs” at the  Mexico border, and the casting of sub-Saharan migration as “Le Peril Noir” in Morocco have prompted billions of dollars of investment in militarized border technologies and  enlisted both international actors (neighbor states, humanitarian organizations, defense  contractors) and local criminal justice actors in the control and containment of  racialized “threats” to the health of the social body. 

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, repeated speeches by the president of the  United States invoking the “Chinese virus” or the “kung flu” sought to establish the disease as foreign to the U.S. national body, locating it in Other geographies and bodies. These racialized labels emphasizing the virus as foreign or exogenous also adhered to  U.S. citizens: between March and June, 2,100 hate incidents were reported, including  the stabbing of an Asian American family in a Texas grocery store. In Morocco, the first documented case of the coronavirus was heralded on the cover of newsweekly Le Reporter (March 5, 2020) along with the image of a  hoodie-wearing Black man, even though the actual infected person was a non-Black  Moroccan national recently returned from Italy. In both Morocco and the United States,  borders were closed, though in the case of the United States, travel to and from  European states remained unchecked for several weeks even as the number of European infections spiked alarmingly. The racial discourses and uneven practices of containment expose a more fundamental border, one that seeks to expel racialized Others—viruses, citizens, migrants and refugees, incarcerated people—not only from the national body  but from the realm of the human. 

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Though the virus and various state responses have impacted everyone, for marginalized  communities the “novel-ness” of the coronavirus compounds already existing physical,  legal, social, and economic vulnerabilities. This has happened in myriad ways that  include the large number of “essential workers” drawn from these communities who  must choose between exposing themselves to the virus or losing their jobs or visas; the  predisposition of some groups to more serious effects of the virus due to structural  factors impacting health outcomes; and failures of economic relief packages or social  services to include undocumented people. Importantly, the public health emergency has  lent a new layer of legitimacy to the disproportionate amount of policing and  containment directed at the racialized poor, and has thickened the notion of security by  adding risk of spreading disease to other categories of riskiness already affixed to certain  communities— criminality, terrorism, or “stealing” jobs. 

This entanglement of public health with practices of policing and containment is not  new. Foucault linked the birth of the modern prison to the disciplinary mechanisms of 17th century plague cities in Europe. Fear of contamination and disease spurred the development of modern-day policing and spatial strategies of enclosure from the  European plague city to the colonial cordon sanitaire. Likewise, immigration law and  border controls were instituted as means to protect the national body from physical and moral diseases thought to be carried by or embodied in racial Others. As Alison  Bashford meticulously detailed in her history of public health governance in Australia,  “health management and race management” are fundamental logics of border control  and are intimately entwined with (white, settler) nation-building (2004, 138). Today  public health governance has become increasingly reliant upon military and police  agents whose relationships with vulnerable populations is characterized by suspicion  and mistrust (Wenham 2019). The sweeping measures put in place by the Moroccan  state to contain COVID-19 fell hardest on migrant people and impoverished Moroccans,  people who had to choose between complying with quarantine orders or feeding  themselves and loved ones, and who were subsequently arrested or beaten by police  enforcing public health mandates. The closing of borders between Europe and Morocco  stranded Moroccan migrant workers in Europe without jobs or means to get home, and left boatloads of African and Middle Eastern migrants in distress in Mediterranean and Atlantic waters. Hundreds have drowned. In the US, COVID-19 has torn through prisons, jails and detention centers, adding to the already unconscionable death toll among Black, Latinx, and aged populations even as white nationalists and their president flouted advice on mask-wearing and called on elderly people to sacrifice themselves.

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We will look back on this period not only as the age of COVID but the age of George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor, of Oluwatoyin Salau, of Jacob Blake, of Abdel Wahab Yousif,  of Michel Pitchou Bola, of the numerous people who perished from the rapacious violence of the disease and the racial state. The scale of the pandemic and its effects  expose a counter-critique that identifies how certain rationalities of security, human  value, and legitimate violence take root in various places and through multiple discourses and domains of state power, especially in moments of crisis. We need  something other than police or containment to ensure our survival and well-being as a  people-species. We need fewer lines, not more, if we are ever to achieve what Katherine McKittrick (2006) calls “more humanly workable geographies,” expansive, open  territories in which no one is illegal, no one is disposable, no one’s death is “reasonable”  or justifiable, no one’s humanity is dependent upon the dehumanization of another.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my comrades at the Connecticut Bail Fund and  migrant friends and interlocutors in Morocco for fighting the fight. Thanks also to Son  Ca Lam, always a close and honest reader. 

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge.

Bashford, A. 2004. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Health. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Beisel, U. 2015. “Body Bags: The Politics of Sealing Off in the Anthropocene.” Societyandspace.org. August 26. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/body-bags-the-politics-of-sealing-off-in-the-anthropocene

Gross-Wyrtzen, L. 2020. “Contained and Abandoned in the ‘Humane’ Border: Black Migrants’ Immobility and Survival in Moroccan Urban Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775820922243

Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, and B. Roberts. 1978. Policing theCrisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: MacMillan Press.

McKittrick, K. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Sakala, L. 2014. “Graph: Connecticut Incarceration Rates by Race/Ethnicity, 2010.” PrisonPolicy Institute. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/2010rates/CT.html

Wenham, C. 2019. “The Oversecuritization of Global Health: Changing the Terms of the Debate.” International Affairs 95(5): 1093-1110.