Shut Down Racist Immigration Prisons: On Saturday 8th November 2014 I went to Harmondsworth for a protest by supporters of Movement for Justice calling for immigration detention centres such as the two next door to each other on the Bath Road on the northern edge of Heathrow Airport to be closed down.
The hundred or so protesters included quite a few who had at some time been held in Harmondsworth or Colnbrook immigration centres or the others around the country. The two at Harmondsworth had recently been brought under the same management as Heathrow Immigration Removal Centre, run by Mitie.
Although organised by MfJ, this and other protests at detention centres are supported by a wide range of organisations and one of the banners was full of their logos.
Back in 2014 over 30,000 people, 85% men, were held in these prisons. The name is misleading as over the years less than half of detainees who left them were actually deported. Most who leave them are on immigration bail while their claims for asylum are being investigated.
Around a third are imprisoned for relatively short periods of 28 days or less, but this is indefinite detention and at least one person was kept in immigration jail for a day under three years with 2-3% being held longer than 6 months.
When Mitie took over the management of these prisons they told police not to allow protests in the the roadway between the two centres and around the side and back of Harmondsworth which are on land owned by the Crown where they could be seen by some held on the upper floors of the centres which are surrounded by 20ft fences with a solid metal lower half.
Instead the protesters were confined to an area in front of the administrative block of the Harmondsworth Centre, out of sight of the detainees, but their noisy protest could be heard inside both blocks. People inside, locked away without a release date, often feel they have been forgotten by the outside world and this gives them some hope.
As well as calling for the closure of detention centres, the protesters also expressed shock at the decision by the EU to stop rescuing immigrants crossing the Mediterranean, and a placard read ‘Refusing to Rescue is Murder – End the “Let them Drown” policy’.
Some of those held have mobile phones as they need these to pursue their asylum claims, and the protesters were able to contact some of those held inside and relay their views over the public address system they had brought with them.
The detainees say they are mistreated by staff, given poor and sometimes inappropriate food and suffer from a lack of proper medical care,. But overwhelmingly they complained as I wrote in 2014, “that although they had committed no crime (and in most cases were victims of crimes in their own countries), in the UK they were treated as criminals and locked away. They say Asylum detention is worse than prison for detainees because they have no idea when it may come to an end – some had been held for well over a year – and the detainees feel under a constant threat of being forcibly returned to the country they fled because they feared for their lives or had been tortured.”
Shut Down Racist Immigration Prisons
Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos
All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.