Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

xx Open Borders
who flee death, prison or torture can find themselves taken to a place called
a ‘removal centre’ before they have even entered the country. Others are picked
up for not having their immigration papers in order. Such people, who are
threatened with immediate deportation, now form a growing proportion of
those detained.
The 2002 Act repealed the provision for automatic bail hearings for immigration
detainees which had been in the 1999 Act but had not been
implemented. It thus removed the government’s one response to repeated
criticisms of the lack of judicial supervision of detention. The Home Office now
moves people around from centre to centre at frequent intervals without
notice or reason; it is hard to escape the conclusion that this is to deny them
contact with their lawyers, families and supporters, and to reduce further the
possibility of bail. Possibly because the private security companies running
the prisons cannot process the paperwork fast enough, some detainees have
been kept in vans for more than 24 hours, deprived of food, water and even
toilet facilities. There are well documented examples of detainees being treated
with violence by the private companies transferring them.
Perhaps the worst innovation of the current Labour government is that,
unlike any other government in Europe, it now detains whole families,
including young children and babies, and pregnant women. At the end of 2002
115 women were detained. The Home Office gives no figures on the number
of children, apparently considered non-persons, detained. Because of the
inability of UKDS to protect the women and families detained in
Harmondsworth, they have been moved elsewhere. Yarl’s Wood was reopened
in September 2003 for women and apparently, in future, children. Children
and their mothers are detained at Dungavel, Tinsley and Oakington. Some
children have been moved from mainstream schools, where they were much
appreciated by their friends and teachers, and have been locked up in prisonlike
conditions, at Dungavel for example, for months on end, in spite of
numerous protests, in the House of Lords and elsewhere. Pregnant women
have inadequate medical attention. Mothers have to queue for hours to
receive powdered milk or nappies, which are allocated one at a time. A report
by Bail for Immigration Detainees, A Crying Shame: Pregnant Asylum Seekers
and their Babies in Detention, gives a harrowing account based on interviews
with some of these women.
Most of the immigration prisons continue to be run by private security firms.
Group 4 in particular continues to display its brutal incompetence, and
continues to be hired by the government. It won the contract to build and
run the new Yarl’s Wood prison. On 14 February 2002, a few months after
it was opened, the occupied half of it was destroyed in a fire. The best the police
could say was that ‘we can categorically say it is unlikely’ that anyone died.
As had happened at Campsfield (see pp. 128–33), some of the detainees were
arbitrarily picked out by Group 4 and prosecuted, in this case for arson,
violent disorder and affray. It remains unclear why and how the fire was started;
there were no convictions for arson, and the defendants themselves were