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Based on clinical work carried out in an emergency accommodation center for migrants, we attempt to understand the psychological issues arising from imprisonment during migration and its aftermath: before departure in regimes where freedom is restricted (Sudan, Chad, Guinea) and where these people are considered by the governing power to be potentially subversive or belonging to an ethnic group close to the opposition; in the countries through which these people travel, in particular Libya, where imprisonment is part of a system of inverted values in which armed groups enslave Black migrants after imprisoning, torturing, and auctioning them; and in France where, undocumented, they find themselves in an administrative detention center prior to their expulsion to the first European country in which they were forced to have their fingerprints taken, or to their country of origin. Clinical accounts, representative in their singularity of subjective problems meeting collective responses, enable us to understand the prison experience, between past and present traumas, to question the therapeutic process in conditions in which imprisonment and expulsion threaten its continuation, and to reflect on the impact of confinement and ostracism at an individual and group level.