Companionship and Support in Detention
JRS UK’s Detention Outreach Team accompanies men held in Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) near Heathrow – Colnbrook and Harmondsworth – offering practical help, emotional support, and friendship during a time of deep uncertainty.
Our mission in detention
Since our founding in the 1980s, JRS UK has stood alongside people held in immigration detention. Over the decades, the number of people detained has grown, and so has the trauma they endure.
Many of those we meet have survived torture, trafficking, and abuse. Detention itself adds another layer of suffering – and its impact often lasts long after release. The pain doesn’t simply end when the people are released from detention.
"You’re locked up and you don’t know what’s going on and what’s going to happen to you. This is the worst thing you can do to a human being wherever they are from."
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Detained and Dehumanised, 2020
How we help
Our team provides:
- Practical support and casework advice including help to contact solicitors and navigate complex legal processes
- Emotional support during detention
- Regular telephone support and social visits, providing companionship and dignity
- Creative and social activities offering a space for expression and connection.
- Pastoral support, walking alongside people in the uncertainty and distress of detention
What is immigration detention?
It’s the holding of people in prison-like conditions for administrative purposes – often without judicial oversight. The UK is the only country in Europe with no time limit on detention.
Who can be detained?
Anyone subject to immigration control can be detained. Many refused asylum seekers are later recognised as refugees. Others are detained after serving criminal sentences, even if they’ve lived in the UK most of their lives.
What is detention like?
Detention centres resemble prisons, with high walls, barbed wire, and strict controls. Vulnerable people face abuse, humiliation, and limited access to mental health support – despite the known harm of prolonged detention.
Read more
Accessing legal advice in detention: becoming an impossibility (2025)
Access to legal advice in immigration detention is rapidly disappearing. JRS UK’s latest report reveals that only 38% of people detained in Harmondsworth and Colnbrook had legal representation, exposing the urgent failure of the Detained Duty Advice Scheme. This is not justice – it must change.
Napier Barracks: the inhumane reality (2023)
JRS UK ran an outreach service to Napier for two years from October 2020. What we saw on the ground was deeply troubling: the site was bleak and rundown, the setting was securitised, the accommodation was crowded. This all took a serious toll on mental health. The report draws from the accounts of 17 forcibly displaced people supported by JRS UK held in Napier Barracks between July and November 2022.
After Brook House: continued abuses in immigration detention (2024)
JRS UK’s research – conducted with people with more recent experience of detention at different detention centres – finds clear, and deeply disturbing, parallels between practices and culture revealed by the 2017 Brook House Inquiry and recent and ongoing practices and culture across UK immigration detention.
Detained and Dehumanised (2021)
This report draws from the accounts of 27 forcibly displaced people supported by JRS UK, with direct experience of detention spanning the last 20 years. It finds that the Home Office policy of immigration detention fosters a culture of death, self-harm and ongoing trauma leaving those who are detained, or threatened by the prospect of detention, dehumanised.
