THE WAIT FOR FREEDOM
Asylum seeking and migrant children - including toddlers are being held in detention centres for indefinite periods
ACHILD was taken into an immigration detention centre nearly every six days in 2017. Analysis of the latest Home Office figures show that a total of 63 children under the age of 17 entered these centres last year - 10 of whom were under the age of five.
Immigration detention centres are places where people are held if their applications to live in the UK have been refused or are still being processed.
In many cases, these people are seeking asylum from their own country because they risk persecution due to their race, religion, nationality or political beliefs.
According to Detention Action, many people in the centres can’t return to the country they came from even if they wanted to.
This is because many asylum seekers try to enter the UK without a passport, but their country of origin won’t allow them to return without one.
Others remain detained indefinitely because their country is considered too dangerous to send them back.
A total of 27,348 people entered detention in 2017, including the 63 children - at a rate of 75 people every day.
The figures do not show the average length of time spent in the detention centre.
However, they do show the longest length of time a person has been held in the centre for each quarter of the year.
As of June 2017, a man had been held in detention for 772 days - more than two years. That isn’t the longest stay on record, however. In December 2011, a man had been held for 2,250 days within a centre, the equivalent of more than six years. Many critics of detention centres have queried their purpose given that so many people are then released back into the community. For example, 53% of the 28,256 people released from detention centres in 2017 were allowed to remain in the UK. Admittedly, the vast majority were released on bail as opposed to being granted permanent leave to remain in the country.
However, it still means that just 46% of detainees were sent back to their country of origin.
A spokesperson for the Joint Council of the Welfare of Immigrants said: “The human cost of immigration detention is high.
“There is a clear detrimental impact on a person’s mental health and well-being of not knowing how long they could be locked up for, with no release date to look forward to.
“Many of those detained are vulnerable, they might be refugees having fled persecution in their own country, or victims of torture, trafficking or gender violence. “Although there are policies in place designed to protect such individuals from detention, our own caseload shows that such policies are routinely breached and they are forced to seek recourse to the courts to secure their release. “Last year we were involved in a case in which a Home Office representative stated that our client would be detained despite acknowledging that she could not be returned to her own country she had left when a child. “This is symptomatic of the Home Office’s poor decision making, but it is clear that where a person’s liberty is at stake, this should be guarded jealously.”