Training morality: Shaping Values in Border Policing?

• In Event: The Moral Worlds of Immigration Bureaucrats I

Abstract

This paper explores the role of training as a key pillar in the socialization of ethics and moral values within policing forces, particularly in border enforcement. Drawing on document analysis of training programs that border agents in the Netherlands and Mexico undergo, this paper examines the moral frameworks embedded in their training and the ways in which these frameworks shape professional discretion and ethical reasoning. We focus on the training programs implemented after critical events in 2023, which sparked widespread concern regarding the ethical and moral values underpinning border enforcement practices. In the case of Mexico, the analysis centers on the aftermath of the fatal fire at the Ciudad Juárez detention facility, where at least 40 migrants died, raising urgent questions about the responsibility of migration officials and the structural conditions enabling such tragedies. In the Netherlands, we focus on the impact of the court ruling banning ethnic profiling as a detection practice, a ruling that has prompted a reevaluation of discretionary decision-making and bias in border policing.
Our analysis identifies a shift in training paradigms that, while reinforcing procedural compliance, increasingly incorporates human rights discourse as a central framework and introduces a "positionality approach," which seeks to integrate personal and institutional accountability into the moral compass of border agents. We explore whether such human rights-inflected approaches meaningfully transform policing culture or primarily function as a legitimacy-seeking response to public scrutiny, contributing to discussions on the limits of ethical training and the structural factors shaping moral values in border policing.

Authors

• Amalia Campos Delgado, Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law & Society, Leiden University

• Maartje van der Woude, Professor of Law and Society, Universiteit Leiden