“My head sometimes…I’m angry like this, I start shouting because I’m traumatised from detention….”; “When I was released it was even difficult for me to cross a road because of mental torture for 7 months.”
These are the words of people who had sought asylum in the UK, but ultimately been incarcerated in immigration detention. They speak powerfully to the harm caused by immigration detention. And their words are corroborated by a wide body of evidence demonstrating that detention is damaging to both physical and mental health. Even those who go into detention well are scarred by it, and it is even worse for people with pre-existing vulnerabilities. Torture survivors regularly compare detention to a second torture.
The situation is compounded by huge problems accessing healthcare in detention, and by an almost total failure in the safeguards that are supposed to identify vulnerable people. JRS UK’s report After Brook House, revealed that people entered detention in urgent need of medical attention they did not receive for months; people with diabetes were denied medication and only given paracetamol; in one case detention centre staff walked past someone struggling with chest pain and did nothing; in another, staff daily witnessed an individual with such poor mental health that he would both defecate and eat on the floor. Again, they did nothing. These findings echoed the Brook House Inquiry and numerous other reports. This is what healthcare in immigration detention is normally like.
The treatment of vulnerable people in detention, which has always been appalling, has been getting even worse over a number of years. In a scathing independent report in 2016, Stephen Shaw highlighted how frequently vulnerable people were being detained, and the harm this was causing them. The government’s response was to introduce the ‘Adults at Risk in Immigration Detention’ policy, which actually increased the detention of vulnerable people. The policy weighs evidence of vulnerability against evidence of immigration factors in deciding whether to maintain detention. Immigration factors nearly always win. The previous policy, of detaining vulnerable people only under exceptional circumstances, was not working and was not good enough, but it was better than this. Then, in 2021, survivors of trafficking within the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) designed to identify and support them were brought under the Adults at Risk policy, so that immigration factors were weighed against vulnerability in deciding whether to continue detention. Previously, trafficking survivors in the NRM were supposed to be released unless there was a public order reason for this not to happen. With this alteration, the detention of recognised survivors of trafficking hugely increased.
Immigration detention is doing permanent damage to people’s health. The new government has an opportunity to change this. But to do so, it must acknowledge how harmful detention is, and shape policy accordingly. Rather than pressing ahead with its plans to expand the detention estate, it should end the use of immigration detention. If it won’t do that, it must urgently commit to not detaining vulnerable people.
