Good boys,gang members,asylum gained and lost: The devastating reflections of a bureaucrat-ethnographer

State institutions and their acts of indifference, valorization, and violence operate through relationships, emotions, legal framings, and people. Engaging feminist geographic interventions, in this article we center state employees and their quotidian, affective relationships to asylum-seekers and the asylum process. We show how these actors embody state migration control through their daily practices. And we highlight the insights of former employees undertaking reflexive feminist research into their past working life. Drawing on the memories of one such “bureaucrat-ethnographer” (Valdivia), and our shared feminist engagement together, we outline three key insights for research on state migration practice. First, that the training state employees undergo aims to develop objective, neutral, and emotion-free decision-making, yet it relies on highly affective and biased state assumptions about asylum-seekers and their motivations. Second, while this training fosters simplified understandings of the causes and impacts of violence, a feminist geographic lens makes visible its complexly power-laden machinations. Last, we assert that state employees face distinct emotional pressures as they deal with devastation: the state's, their own, and that of asylum claimants. Valuing the insights of bureaucrats who become, or are at once, undertaking critical research disrupts intellectual divisions and hierarchies and complicates our understanding of the migration control practices of the state.