“At the Edges of the Law”: Discretionary Power and Humanitarian Negotiations in Migrant Return Counselling

European migration policies have placed a growing emphasis on returns – particularly for migrants who receive a negative asylum decision. The EU and national governments have made significant funds available for return and have relied on partnerships with humanitarian actors for implementing policies of Assisted Voluntary Return. Drawing on interviews at the municipal scale in Belgium and the Netherlands, this paper analyses how humanitarian practitioners enact discretionary power in providing socio-legal counselling to undocumented migrants around the question of return. I explore how humanitarian counsellors exercise discretionary power in a fraught space between resistance and complicity, as they negotiate alternatives to return for undocumented migrants within a larger (geo-)political context that is premised on migrant exclusion via return. This article contributes to scholarship in political and legal geography through a multi-scalar analysis of discretionary power in relation to migration, everyday engagements with law, and negotiated practices of the humanitarian border.