When I tell people about indefinite immigration detention, they are incredulous. Unlike the small boats, whose arrival is blazoned hysterically across our front pages so often, immigration detention is a quiet malignancy that has gone on for years and years. It is a regime in which people are detained as soon as they ask for asylum, or seized without warning when they report to immigration control or from their beds in the small hours of the morning – bundled away in caged vehicles without reasons or destination given, without charge for any criminal offence, and without any knowledge of when or even if they will ever be released.
Immigration detention is, according to government guidelines, supposed to be a very short-term holding place – a few weeks at most before deportation. It is supposed to be a place where people are properly cared for, treated as human beings despite their rejection and the presumed imminence of their departure.
It is none of these things. It is a system of State cruelty; of wastage of human lives, often for months, and often years; of attempted devastation of the human spirit – and it lies largely hidden at the darkest heart of our asylum policy.
Walking for justice
Nine years ago, Refugee Tales, affiliated to the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, began its walks across the English countryside. People walked in solidarity alongside people who had experienced detention, telling stories to each other, listening to each other. In this Chaucerian journey, I learned from those who wanted to share their lived experiences – about the saddest depths of these experiences, about seeking refuge after trauma, torture, persecution – only to find a pitiless incarceration awaiting in this green and pleasant land. Our quest was, and remains, to bring this system of incarceration to an end.
During the Refugee Tales walk this year, it rained and rained – sometimes biblical in its deluges. But we walked on, and on: 120 people – sometimes more – from Edenbridge to Westminster over five days. One lunchtime we heard Marina Warner speaking with great beauty about sanctuary. In the evenings, there were tales read and told by and for people who have been detained, and music, and dancing. And in the mornings, as we emerged from sleeping bags from church floors, we gathered to read out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, section by section.
Of the 20,354 people grabbed and detained in the year to June 2023, only 22 per cent were actually removed from the UK
‘Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…’ says the preamble. Then, article after article, the proclamations of universal human rights to freedom, dignity, liberty; the right not to be tortured or subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment …
How about this one: ‘All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law’. There is no judicial oversight when someone is grabbed and detained; it is a decision by a Home Office decision-maker, repeatedly so arbitrary, and so bunglingly made, that of the 20,354 people thus grabbed and detained in the year to June 2023, only 22 per cent were actually removed from the UK.
The rest – that is 15,876 human beings – languished until someone ordered their release back into the community whence they had been taken away. Some may well languish still. Among those walking with us this year, Pious was detained and re-detained many times over a period of three years. Others, even longer. Nine years is the longest time.
Sharing stories
The stories of people subjected to detention, told to well-known authors and gathered steadily into the written accounts, constitute the Refugee Tales volumes. Pious’ tale was retold by Ali Smith, a Patron of Refugee Tales, in the first volume, and later republished in the Guardian. It tells you all you need to know about the iniquity of immigration detention.
Pious – a child slave by the age of six, trafficked to the UK in his teens and held for years as a slave here too, before he finally escaped and asked for help, only to be held in detention for three more years – tells his own story, again, in the fifth volume, Refugee Tales V, published in July 2024.
It includes a compelling Afterword from co-editor Prof David Herd, who argues that the ‘hostile environment’ – which has wounded so grievously so many thousands of our fellow human beings – is now morphing into one of intentional erasure and expulsion of the people ‘we’ don’t want. David terms this the ‘expulsive environment’. His account paints a frightening picture of this trajectory.
Indeed, the 2023 ‘Illegal Migration Act’ (IMA) awarded the Home Secretary the absolute power to detain people for as long as she considers ‘reasonable’ – removing even further the remaining vestiges of judicial scrutiny. Those coming here seeking sanctuary, caught up in our frenzy to stop them coming at all, are now enmeshed even further within this vicious limbo.
Acting on outrage
While we walked, a report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons on Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre was finally published on the Government website. Its headline captures his outrage: ‘drugs, despair and decrepit conditions’.
The report echoes findings published last September from the Brook House Inquiry. Again, a heading speaks for itself: ‘Pain and humiliation at toxic Brook House’. The then-shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock declared evidence therein to be ‘utterly harrowing’, with no sign at all of either ‘control or compassion’ from the Government.
David Herd argues that the ‘hostile environment’ is morphing into one of intentional erasure and expulsion; an ‘expulsive environment’
At Westminster, the ultimate destination of our walk, we were met by Lord Alfred Dubs, who spoke in a panel that included two newly-elected Labour members of Parliament, Fleur Anderson, MP for Putney and Peter Lamb (Crawley). Joining Alf Dubs in calling for an end to indefinite detention, they urged us to embark upon urgent, intensive and immediate action.
The new Government still – perhaps – offers a very slightly open door to legislate out of existence this callous and chaotic transgression of the Human Rights charter; at the very least to limit detention to 28 days, and to allow it only with automatic judicial oversight.
We left Westminster with Lord Dubs’ final exhortation to spring into action now. We need now to raise such a clamour, for everyone to write now to their MPs while the iron is hot. We need to tell five people, and ask them to tell five more, and five more again, so that soon there will be thousands upon thousands calling for an end once and for all to this brutal and inhuman practice.
