For our first fieldwork in İstanbul, we selected the district of Fatih. This district is home to some of the city’s most famous historical landmarks, including the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, and Hagia Sophia. At the same time, Fatih also hosts the largest immigrant population in İstanbul. In fact, since 2021 the district has been closed to the settlement of new foreigners due to the high concentration of migrants already residing there.

I arrived in Fatih by metro, and immediately upon exiting the station, I encountered an innovative policy introduced by the Turkish government: the mobile migration point. These mobile units, operated primarily by the police with the support of the Presidency of Migration Management, were established across İstanbul in July 2023 with the sole aim of checking the documents of immigrants.

As I was walking towards the mobile unit, I was briefly stopped by police officers and asked to show my identification. After I explained that I was a Turkish citizen, I was immediately released and allowed to continue. This short interaction set the stage for my closer engagement with the mobile migration point. With this introduction, I approached the car to observe in more detail how this policy is implemented in practice.

Initially, the officials appeared hesitant and cautious when I mentioned that I was preparing a report on the activities of a mobile migration control car. They referred me directly to the head of the unit. Once I introduced myself, the chief police officer was extremely kind and respectful, and he invited me inside for a brief conversation. What was meant to be a short exchange soon developed into a wide-ranging discussion on local migration policies, their rationale, and their broader impacts. Our conversation lasted almost ninety minutes.

Even during my short stay inside the mobile unit, I observed nationals from at least twenty different countries, ranging from South Sudan to Jamaica. However, for security reasons I was not permitted to take comprehensive photographs of the checkpoint, nor could I include images of the interior of the vehicle or the faces of the police officers. Furthermore, while we were speaking about the logic behind the policy, several irregular migrants were apprehended and held inside the car, awaiting transfer to removal centers. This limited the possibility of providing a more complete visual account of the practice, despite my repeated requests. Nevertheless, all mobile migration units are uniform in design, and the vehicle I visited was identical to one already published in an official government photograph.

The officer explained that his team checks the identification documents of thousands of migrants each day, moving regularly between different locations. During my visit, the unit was stationed at one of İstanbul’s busiest transportation hubs, Yenikapı metro station. This station is a strategic site, as it connects two main metro lines with the Marmaray railway, the undersea tunnel linking the European and Asian sides of the city. According to the officer, such hubs are deliberately chosen because they allow the authorities to monitor the mobility of foreigners more effectively. I was surprised by this explanation, as I had always assumed that such measures would primarily target touristic areas. The officer corrected me, stating: “We rarely do such ID checks in touristic areas.” He added that sites such as the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, or Hagia Sophia are intentionally excluded from routine checks. The reasoning behind this, he explained, is the authorities’ desire to avoid disrupting the daily business of shop owners in these areas. Frequent checks, he noted, could create anxiety for tourists, leading to tensions with local merchants. The officers therefore exercise caution not to provoke such conflicts.

The mobile migration points differ markedly from the practices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They do not conduct surprise raids or regular inspections of workplaces to apprehend migrants lacking valid work permits. These duties fall to a separate authority, Ministry of Labour and Social Security. Instead, the presence of the mobile migration points is concentrated in locations that both regular and irregular migrants are likely to use in the course of daily life. The wider effects of these mobile checkpoints cannot be fully assessed, as the authorities do not share systematic data with researchers or the public. Yet, my observations provided some insight into their operation. It became clear that while these units are indeed instrumental in enforcing migration control by increasing the apprehension number of irregular immigrants in the country, they also contribute to increasing the precarity of irregular migrants by making everyday movement through the city more fraught and riskier.