High Politics Before Lower Courts: Deportation and De Facto Bureaucratization in French Courts

Deportation is one of the most politicized tools of contemporary migration control in the Global North. The development of judicial control over what had long been a matter of executive discretion has led, in recent years, to a well-researched backlash against supranational adjudication of deportation cases. The recent joint statement signed by 26 Member States in December 2025 exemplifies how deportation of illegal migrants has become the main dividing line in the political debate on the European Court of Human Rights. This article investigates the lesser-known consequences of the politicization of deportation for the everyday judicial practice in lower courts. Taking the French administrative judiciary as a case-study, it investigates the mechanisms by which the high politics of deportation are transformed into judicial routines in national courts. The article reveals that the political battleground of deportation, taken to lower courts, results not in the politicization of judicial practice but in its bureaucratization. Building on insights from street-level bureaucracy (Biland & Steinmetz, 2017; Lens, 2012; Lipsky, 2010), the article empirically explores the consequences of this bureaucratization in the emergence of local routines of decision-writing and for the exercise of judicial discretion in decision-making. It relies on innovative textual analysis to approximate the quality of legal reasoning in an extensive dataset of 200,000 deportation judgments issued by forty-two French first instance administrative courts between 2022 and 2026. The French judiciary provides uniquely extensive access to judicial data as all lower courts judgments are made available in open data, thus offering a rare opportunity to study everyday judicial decision-making. The quantitative findings are complemented with ten interviews with administrative magistrates conducted between 2021 and 2022. The French case of deportation adjudication provides an example of a de facto bureaucratization whereby the formal independence of the judiciary is not directly threatened, but where successive reforms of judicial procedures progressively isolate deportation cases from the rest of administrative law cases and normalize the devaluation of these cases for magistrates (Cohen, 2009; Qadim, 2013). Under de facto bureaucratic conditions of practice, the primary determinant of judicial decision-making, before the ideology of the judge, appears to be their ability and willingness to resist the routines of practice and dedicate extra time and attention to a given case. This bureaucratization in the shape of procedural reforms represents a subtler form of political pressure over the judiciary than political control over immigration judges in the US (Jain, 2018) or plain de-judicialization of appeals against immigration decisions in the UK (Thomas & Tomlinson, 2018). Such findings contribute to emerging scholarships questioning the extent to which access to courts can be equated with access to justice (Taylor, 2025).