Written evidence submitted by Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary (IDD0024)

Resistance and the Continued Urgency of Abolition

“The history of immigration detention is repeatedly punctuated by anger and resistance of all kinds on the part of detainees, and abuses of power by the overseers. Its existence is dependent on racism, and as long as the state continues to hold people against their will and for no crime, that continuous friction and anger will keep sparking into uprisings, and acts of protest both individual and collective. The scandals of inexorable abuse in detention will periodically burst out to international attention, and the reputation and promise of British fairness and equality will be like a forgotten, worn-out, tattered rag.”

From the introduction of ‘Resistance to Detention & the Urgency of Abolition’, submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry on Immigration Detention, Movement For Justice, by any means necessary; 1st Oct 2014.

Our Recommendations

1)     Abolish All Immigration Detention

2)     End Detained Asylum Casework, set aside negative asylum decisions and judgments processed within detention. End processing of asylum in detention altogether.

3)     End and reverse the Hostile Environment policy

4)     Shift the Burden of Proof in asylum cases onto the Home Office

Movement For Justice by any means necessary – Who we are:

1. Firstly, Movement for Justice by any means necessary (MFJ) is an organisation made up overwhelmingly of members from around the world, who have sought asylum and have been subjected to threat of detention, and many times the reality of detention. We have members who were re-detained two, three and even up to five times. We treat detention as a university of how to fight institutional, systematic racism in Britain as detention is the core of the general ‘hostile environment policy’ developed over the last eight years, itself an escalation of decades of anti-immigrant policies over successive governments. Our members can attest to the experience of detention spanning the last nine years, from having been held in Oakington, Dover, The Verne, Harmondsworth, Colnbrook, Brook House, Campsfield, Dungavel, Morton Hall and Yarl’s Wood, as well as holding centres and prison used for immigration purposes.
2. MFJ has organised and lead the largest demonstrations held at any detention centres in Britain, together with detainees inside as well as ex-detainees outside. Former detainees have always been prominent speakers addressing those inside and protesters outside.
3. Since 7th June 2014 MFJ has organised 9 demonstrations at Harmondsworth / Colnbrook, and 13 at Yarl’s Wood, and sent contingents on demonstrations at Campsfield, Morton Hall and Dungavel.
4. During that time we’ve had the end of Detained Fast Track, the halting of any expansion of specific IRCs, several IRCs shut down, the multiple exposures of abuse, the Sarah Teather-lead APPG Inquiry, the first debate in parliament on the detention system, the Home Office commissioned inquiry on welfare (lead by Stephen Shaw), and multiple damning prison inspector reports.
5. The testimonies of former detainees speaking at all these demonstrations and at public talks and other events, have been clear and unchanging throughout: to shut down detention; that detention is worse than prison; and that the authorities – guards, Home Office caseworkers and healthcare - don’t care about those they hold.

The challenge set down by the Yarl’s Wood hunger strikers – Tell it like it is!

6. There is an opportunity before this committee and a danger. The opportunity is to do something no previous inquiry has managed to do: to take the first steps to reverse the deeply racist direction of immigration policy in Britain that has already lead inexorably to the destruction of lives for many hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and indeed citizens from the ‘Windrush generation’, and those who came from Pakistan/Bangladesh, India, and the former colonies after World War Two, who grew-up here, labored for years and fought against racism. Those who have now been effectively criminalized after decades here are joined to the generation of refugees crossing the Mediterranean. All have been thoroughly betrayed.
7. They all came looking for the Britain that chastises other countries over poor human rights, but they found a Britain that sees the drowning at sea and the destitution at Calais as a necessary deterrent and is responsible for the self-harm, suicides and hunger strikes and uses vulnerability as an instrument of control.
8. The danger for the committee is that you mistakenly see this inquiry as a way to prolong the system of incarcerating immigrants, by ‘improving it’ with a time limit. Responding to the plethora of abuses, which you and previous inquiries have and will uncover, by allowing it to continue with the supposed ‘safeguard’ of a time limit will not address or resolve the explosive issues the detention system inherently has. It will encourage the Home Office to devise ways to speed up deportations or increase the use of no-notice plane tickets that circumvent people’s chances of making a case, rather than make a fair system that searches for truth and provides protection.
9. We have nothing to lose but our chains. Protests and exposure will inevitably rise up against the hostile environment policy, at the centre of which the detention system sits. To hold a mediocre inquiry that did not seek to hear from the movement that has fought on this question for years would be a profound insult to the thousands who have risked being targeted and accused of ‘troublemaking’ because they asserted their basic rights by protesting and organising within those centres, and to the former detainees marching, protesting and building MFJ’s Surround Yarl’s Wood and Surround Harmondsworth demonstrations over the last four years.
10. Thousands of current detainees and thousands of people affected by immigration detention are watching to find out if the truth of their experience is actually going to be heard with no holds barred.
11. How does this committee see it’s priorities in calling this inquiry? If the priority is to fully understand and address the perpetual abuse, anger and resistance that periodically burst into the open, then this committee must accept that it will require starting a longer and properly resourced inquiry with open hearings inside and outside detention centres. If the priority is to preserve detention, which can only be as a way to protect the most divisive and racist anti-immigrant policy Britain has ever had, then nothing about detention will be resolved, and the tension that has already lead to uprisings and national scandal will continue.

Detention is in crisis: Put it out of its misery – abolition!

12. Immigration detention as it stands today is the result of decades of building up a hostile environment. The policy is to make people feel unwelcome, under threat, caught out, guilty, and stigmatized. Detention is a means to achieve that, both as a reality for those detained, and as a threat to those ‘liable to detention’. It was inevitable that detention would develop in the way it has, and be the central battleground of today’s struggles against racism and for immigrants and women’s rights in Britain.
13. The present inquiry by this Home Affairs Committee has origins in the evidence sessions held in September 2017 in response to the Brook House undercover documentary shown on national TV[1]; the committee had to extend beyond these sessions in response to the series of deaths at Morton Hall IRC[2]. At this point the inquiry is formally described as “a short inquiry into immigration detention…” with an open call for submissions on all immigration detention. This latest expansion from the original inquiry sessions responds to the mass resistance action by over a hundred detainees in Yarl’s Wood throughout February and March 2018.
14. The committee should be becoming clear that no mediocre inquiry is going to resolve the friction, anger, protest actions and general turbulence that propel the hated detention system into the public eye.
15. The last eight months have set out a picture of the detention system: the normalization of abusive power shown in Brook House; the high cost of detention shown in the series of deaths in Morton Hall; and - most important as the reason those deplorable examples have not passed into obscurity - the ongoing resistance, shown in the most recent Yarl’s Wood hunger and work strike and multiple mass demonstrations inside and outside. Resistance to detention has only strengthened in the face of the Hostile Environment Policy.
16. Again, the Home Affairs Committee has an opportunity - created by the determination of generations of detainees who refused to stay quiet - to seriously challenge and do something real to end the wretched, hostile anti-immigration environment that is the most explicitly racist aspect of mainstream British politics today.

Resistance in Yarl’s Wood specifically - lessons

17. It is common knowledge among oppressed communities that authorities of the state typically adhere to a policy that it is the response to racism that is viewed as the problem to be controlled, not the racism itself. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry with regard to the police authorities laid this bare, and we assert that the same is true for immigration authorities. Immigration detention epitomizes institutional racism in the immigration system, with the particular addition of being far more hidden. People subjected to detention are easier to discriminate against as the treatment of them is exempted from the equality laws the rest of the population rely on to stand between us and the authorities treatment of us anywhere else in life. The detention system offers an extra level of control to exercise over people, through the implicit (and sometimes explicit) threat that they can be removed at any time if they displease those in charge.
18. The first demonstration organized by MFJ at Yarl’s Wood IRC was on the 18th April 2015 (figure 1.) and was in support of women held inside who were campaigning against deportations and the whole regime revealed by the Channel 4 News undercover reports[3] of March 2015. The undercover report had shown guards referring to women detained as animals, talking of beating detainees up, ‘let them slash their wrists’, and the contemptible response to a woman who had a miscarriage while detained. Detainees at the time recognized the voices of guards in the Channel 4 report, speaking behind their backs and in reality confirming what they already knew from experience – that in the eyes of this system they are less than human. The management had reason to fear the damage to their reputation and risk to their contract.
19. At that time women detainees including members of MFJ began writing on their clothes messages like ‘We Are Not Animals, We Are Human Beings’ and ‘We Want Freedom’, and they wore these day-to-day. Several of those who took this action described managers whom they don’t normally see around, confronting them alone and telling them the ominous ‘implications’ to their wearing messages and pressuring them to hand over their T-shirts in return for black T-shirts. It was detainees response to racism was viewed as the problem to get under control.

Figure 1 Former detainee wears her hand-written ‘We Are Not Animals’ T-shirt from her time inside, at MFJ demonstration outside Yarl’s Wood, 18th April 2015

20. At that time the warnings and implicit threats were verbal and not put in writing. During the most recent mass actions in March 2018 the authorities did put in writing similar ominous warnings – in letters addressed to those on hunger strike and referred to in parliament by the Shadow Home Secretary[4], the threat that this would lead to speeding up their case in a negative direction.
21. The committee has the evidence of these recent letters. We urge you to invite testimony from MFJ members on the experience of asserting one’s rights and dignity, and the way in which the detention authorities respond. This is crucial as it will show how institutional racism extinguishes any complaint or oversight mechanisms.

Case study – Adults at Risk policy – Rule 35 – Undermined by DAC

22. The committee, to do its job, should begin from the premise that the burden of proof be on the Home Office, because this system runs on the assumption that detainees are all liars, and therefore every illness, complaint, assertion, fear is all false. That thoroughly and fundamentally detracts from all the policies that purport to ‘protect’ detainees (and only really ends up protecting detention itself). 

“You are there termed as a liar, whatever you say is a lie. They want us to have the burden of proof and we know that in some of the cases we have, it’s like you have to explain what you’ve undergone, what you went through. You don’t have photos, you don’t have newspaper articles, you don’t have letters from your family members or whatsoever. But that doesn’t mean that all what we are saying is lies. It is true! So if we have been isolated into the hands of those who took advantage of the situation because of the condition we found ourselves in and the public are silent over it - they don’t make any changes. So we are here to speak about the women who are in Yarl’s Wood at this point in time and those who have been there. Because if you come out of that place, you are no longer yourself. You have to look behind your shoulder before speaking because somewhere you have lost your confidence, because if you are looked at as being a liar you feel that no one trusts you anymore. No matter what you say or do, people will not listen to you. To them, you don’t even exist. “ Lisa C, former Yarl’s Wood detainee, MFJ protest rally of abuse in Yarl’s Wood IRC, at the Home Office 18/09/2013

23. For example, beginning with the assumption that asylum seekers are lying is already a problem in any case, but going through an asylum claim from inside detention implies negative credibility from the outset. Detained Asylum Casework must be scrapped altogether and asylum claims be conducted outside detention, as the entire process from initial interview through to the court hearing is tainted by trauma and mental health problems.
24. We include a case study of ‘O’ (appendix 1) who was detained on arrival at the airport, has no criminal history, is identified as an adult at risk, has completed a Rule 35, is a victim of rape with mental health issues, but has nevertheless gone through her asylum claim whilst held as a prisoner in Yarl’s Wood. By the things said and things done she has been reminded at every stage that she is in the hands of strangers who disbelieve her and who see her as undeserving of refuge, and that they have the power of god over her.
25. Despite the end of Detained Fast Track, the story of ‘O’ is one that is very familiar to MFJ. There can be no fair process for asylum seekers whilst detained, Fast-Track or DAC.

“In all the interviews I had and when I had the appeal I have was scared and confused, even though I had an interpreter. I was frightened to let anyone know that I am gay because I had experienced so much violence and all the time I was frightened of what would happen to me if I was sent back to Senegal. I still didn’t understand anything about the asylum system, so even when things were translated I did not understand what was happening. I was constantly asked to answer things I didn’t know or could only guess at, like the dates when things happened.”  Tacko’s Testimony to “UKBA on Trial” MFJ public hearing on 03/03/13.

What Tacko describes going through whilst detained on fast track seven years ago, is exactly what ‘O’ is experiencing under DAC right now.

26. The fact that people are disbelieved by those who profit from their detention, and those who follow a policy that for political reasons is tasked with reducing immigration to meet targets, does not change the reality of what people are saying regarding why they cannot leave, or their illness or trauma. It simply indicts a system that will not listen and does not recognize black people as having the same humanity as white people. The recent death of Nancy Motsamai[5] joins a list of unnecessary deaths that the immigration system must answer for. MFJ members are reminded of our member, Jackie Nanyonjo’s death[6], following her injuries sustained from a forced removal in January 2013.
27. The Home Office has repeatedly maligned the character of detainees who have a criminal record, irrespective of their crime or sentence served. They are all as a permanent ‘danger’ or ‘risk’ to the public. Had the Home Office not had the means to curtail their rights they would be re-building their lives in their community. We hear the same insinuations historically used to justify racial profiling in stop and search. It licenses the view that a black person or foreign person guilty of any crime is worse than a white person, particularly a citizen guilty of the same crime, and urges fear and paranoia amongst white people. The treatment of “FNO’s” is racist and xenophobic, and habitual in a system that continues to disproportionately stop and search, and criminalize black communities.
28. Detention is a place where people are hidden away out of the public eye, guards are given extensive powers to control and manage an adverse, often despairing situation, and abuses of power are inevitable. No one deserves to be in immigration detention. In the community independent services exist, community and often family.
29. From the standpoint of all of us effected by detention including seeing our family members or friends there, if the authorities refuse to recognize why it is wrong to have detained grandparents who lived 50 or 60 years in Britain – the ‘Windrush generation’ - and that they humiliate, harass and deport them, why would any of the decisions to detain any individual be considered ‘safe’? The policy is driven by a political doctrine of scapegoating immigrants. Immigrant-bashing is normalised by policies like the massive growth of routine mass detention of immigrants, at the cost of our communities and like slavery, it cannot be mended – it has to be abolished.

APPENDIX 1

MFJ Case Study

The case of ‘O’

Claiming asylum whilst in detention (Detained Asylum Casework – DAC)

A particular form of torture

Background:

1. O is a woman from an African nation who lost her husband in 2007. Following the death of her husband, his brothers and family (some of whom were involved in criminal gangs) started to terrorise her over his property, which they ransacked and she had to run away because it was not safe to stay there. It escalated to rape when she refused to marry her brother in law and let him take her children, he then went on to arrange for her to be gang raped by 5 men and continued to sexually assault her regularly.  As a result of this O contracted HIV.
2. Homeless and terrified her husband’s family would take her children she put them with a maternal aunt and went on the run again, often living on the street, in a church, moving around. Her aunt at some point handed O’s children over to her brother in law’s family because they offered to pay for the children’s education and she could not afford to keep them. O was devastated but she was too afraid and had no resources to fight to get her children back. Her aunt had been like a mother to her since her mum had died when she was young, but it had also been a difficult relationship with a lot of physical abuse; despite that O never imagined her aunt (who she often calls mum) would hand her children over to their fathers family, that relationship is now completely broken.
3. To this day O has not disclosed her HIV status even to her own family (including her cousin’s in the UK) because of the shame and stigma attached to the diagnosis. She managed to survive by working occasionally for a cousin as an administrator in his company and by selling some containers her family had given her. Her cousin helped her to get a ticket and apply for a visa to come to the UK so she could visit her cousin here. O arrived in the UK on 11/11/2017 deeply traumatised, with £20 in her pocket, terrified of having to go back to her home country, she knew nothing about the concept of asylum. O was refused entry and taken straight into detention from the airport.
4. In Yarl’s Wood her cousin helped O get legal representation to challenge the decision to refuse her entry, every attempt to resolve the case was rejected and O was becoming increasingly distraught. She was given a ticket to return to her home country and that was when the real terror kicked in. She confided in her fellow detainees about what she’d been through and someone told her about claiming asylum. On 22/11/2017 O claimed asylum.

After Claiming asylum – a new form of torture begins

5. In the early hours of the morning on 23rd November 2017, sometime around 2am, guards woke O up, told her to pack everything and go with them. She asked what it was about and they said ‘we don’t know’. O was terrified she was being deported; at this point she did not have a solicitor and did not know anything about the process of claiming asylum or what her rights were.
6. She was taken to reception and told she was going to the airport to have her ‘interview’, to this day she does not understand the difference between a screening interview and a substantive interview, all she heard was ‘airport’, all she knew was all her things had been packed and she was woken up in the middle of the night. She said several times that she felt sick, at one point she was given a sick back.
7. She was put in a van and driven over several hours to Heathrow (she cant identify exactly where she was but she saw aeroplanes flying and the guards told her it was Heathrow). She was put by herself in a room for 30 minutes. A man came out to her and standing over her started to aggressively ask her how she knew about asylum and proceeded to tell her that she was about to be interviewed and if she ‘failed’ she would be forcibly deported in handcuffs and a restraint belt. He then took her to another room and proceeded to do an asylum-screening interview. O remembers very little of that interview, her mind was in bits, she was sick and terrified, there was no interpreter. When it was finished she was put in another room for a while before he came back and got her to sign something, but she doesn’t remember what it was she signed.
8. O was subject to an initial interview with no advance warning, after only having a couple of hours sleep and nothing to eat or drink, she was not given adequate explanation, had no emotional or legal support with her, she was taken to an airport – something which will strike fear into the hearts of most asylum seekers and faced an aggressive male interviewer. The majority of asylum seekers have faced some form or torture, abuse, sexual violence and persecution. The only purpose served by putting asylum seekers through this torture of claiming asylum whilst imprisoned, is to re-traumatise them and make it more likely their asylum case can be dismissed because of the inevitable inconsistencies that result. This is a pattern Movement for Justice has seen time and time again.
9. This initial interview lasted about 1 hour and we now know it was her screening interview, the written record of that interview records it as having started at 8.20am and finished at 9.05am.
10. After all of that, she was left in a room alone for 3 hours before a van came to take her back to Yarl’s Wood. She describes how the van stopped several times before getting back to Yarl’s Wood sometime after 10pm. She had not eaten or had anything to drink all day.
11. What followed were two further ‘interviews’ that took place in Yarl’s Wood, O does not know why she had so many interviews. We know from the paperwork that for some reason she was subject to two screening interviews, one on the 23/11/2017 at Heathrow, the second on 27/11/2017 at Yarl’s Wood.
12. For the second screening interview it was a different man carrying out the interview with a woman interpreter speaking to O via a telephone. It lasted 1-1.5 hour’s; at this point O still did not have a solicitor. O describes how tired she was, how distressed, that she just wanted it to be over with, to forget everything. O describes how she stopped using the interpreter because she couldn’t hear her very well on the phone, it was confusing her and she just wanted it all over with.
13. O’s substantive interview took place in the same small room in Yarl’s Wood on 06/12/2017; this time O did have a solicitor and an interpreter present, both were men. She was in a small room with three men expected to talk about her experience’s, which include being gang raped and tortured. O was asked if she would prefer a woman to interview her but she describes being so desperate for the whole thing to be over she just went along with everything.
14. What O describes is a common response by women who have experienced sexual abuse and rape. Paralysis in the face of authority figures, being unable to protect oneself and ask for needs to be met. Those difficulties are magnified dramatically while in detention making the process of claiming asylum impossible.
15. On 19/01/2018 a psychiatrist at the instruction of her solicitor examined O. The Psychiatrist diagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and advised that she had not been in a fit state to be interviewed.
16. O was given a rule 35 report whilst in Yarl’s Wood, the GP accepted that she was likely a victim of torture and that her scarring was consistent with her story. They also concluded that her mental state would “continue to deteriorate” whilst she was kept in detention.
17. As a result of the Rule 35 the Home Office categorised O as meeting level 2 of the Adult at Risk Policy. Despite this they concluded that she should continue to be detained.
18. The Home Office refused O’s claim for asylum, the central reason for their refusal was inconsistencies’ between the three interviews about dates; they described her as being ‘internally inconsistent throughout’. When subjected to the kind of abusive and torturous process that O was subjected to it was impossible for her to present any kind of consistent history.
19. O became appeal rights exhausted on 26/03/2018, she is at risk of imminent deportation.

April 2018