Recent interest in the securitization of immigration has highlighted a significant shift in immigration enforcement, from border regulation to the control of territorially present populations. Emphasis has focused on the production of migrant illegality and strategies that criminalize undocumented workers. In this article, we shift the focus of analysis to examine how legal residents convicted of non-immigration-related criminal offences are also actively produced as deportable subjects. Drawing on research examining records of appeal cases involving Jamaican nationals in removal proceedings consequent to a criminal conviction, we illustrate how deportability is produced by the deportation process itself, through legal practices that assert migrant criminality and alienage. We suggest ‘criminality’ not only comes to represent migrant subjectivity, at the expense of other forms of subjectivity based on belonging and territorial presences, but acts as affirmation of alienage.