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Our destination is a 19th century hunting lodge in the Scottish countryside. A group of men stand outside smoking as protection against the midges in the cool June air, looking out over the vast landscape from behind a barbed wire fence.

 

Welcome to Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre, Scotland’s indefinite detention centre, deep in the back of nowhere.

Barbed wire and grey fencing surround the forgotten lodge. We wait a little too long for a guard to let us in. There are locked doors at every turn. We’re fingerprinted and patted down before entering the visiting room.

There’s a coffee machine. The guards are nice enough - just doing their job. We call some people down to make sure they have lawyers; to make sure they’re ok. There are over 200 people currently being held here, with women considerably outnumbered by men.

Immigration detention is designed as a holding facility for administrative purposes. It may be to facilitate a person’s removal from the UK, to ensure that they don’t run away while a claim is being resolved, or to establish somebody’s identity. It is an administrative process rather than a criminal procedure, and so it is the Home Office, not judges, that have the power to detain.

 

The UK has one of the largest detention estates in Europe, and is the only European country with indefinite detention. You don’t know when you are going to get out - it could be days, weeks, months, years.

 

Detention was designed as a last resort, but is increasingly being used as a holding facility for people who don’t even need to be removed from the country. Of the 27,809 people who left detention in 2017, 52% were released back into their communities. For around 14,000 individuals, detention was probably not justified.

And the other 14,000? They included victims of trafficking and slavery, sent back to home countries; homeless European nationals; students who overstayed their visas, or arrived on the wrong one; people who just showed up for a standard check-in at the Home Office, as they have to do every week or sometimes every day, or those who missed a check due to lack of funds or illness. Some sought asylum, some were transferred into detention after serving the punishment of a prison sentence.

The mental strain is palpable. People don’t know how long they will be held or whether they’ll be taken from their families and lives. Some feel that prison would be better – at least they’d know when they would be getting out. Tears burst to the surface easily. Increasingly, people are released into homelessness and destitution, with no support.

A small number of people have been held in detention for over three years, but any length of time is too long. Dungavel may be better than other such facilities, but we must end indefinite detention and the need for these centres.

Diane Abbott has called for a time limit on detention, which hopefully will get that ball rolling. Caroline Lucas takes a stronger stance, naming Yarl’s Wood – the women-only indefinite detention centre – as a place of psychological torture. But we need practical community-based alternatives that work for individuals caught up in this broken system, which eventually remove the need for detention at all.

Sixteen months ago I wrote a blog declaring that it isn’t easy being an American under the leadership of President Trump. The ensuing months have made my position even more difficult. As President Trump visits Scotland this week I have been reflecting on his immigration policies and what they have meant for my family.

 

Over the past year and a half, my husband has used his experience as a doctor to spend time working in Mosul helping with the humanitarian crisis that existed when ISIS was finally “cleared” from the city. Temporary field hospitals were set up on the outskirts of Mosul and casualties from the fighting were transferred in for emergency treatment. He spent more than two months on the edge of this warzone with a UN appointed international medical team.
 
They worked long hours in austere conditions to treat and save many people. The security was tight while they lived in a small compound surrounded by guards and barbed wire fencing. He endured long days and hot dusty living conditions. He was there because of his expertise on treating gun shot wounds.

 

One day he had to treat a baby whose bullet narrowly missed her heart. He operated on men, women and children. He listened to heartbreaking stories of people who lost family members and their homes. Almost everyone was malnourished and starving. These patients had to make terrible choices while living in Mosul about whether to leave or stay - both dangerous options. Many of these casualties were injured from landmines or snipers as they chose to flee. At least they were offered medical treatment to save lives and limbs.

 

After his six weeks he arrived home exhausted but satisfied he was able to make a difference and save innocent lives. And that was that. He returned to his day job with the idea that one day he may do something like that again.

 

Then we went to book our summer holiday to America. We have a big family reunion planned for my mother’s 80th birthday this summer. My children and I are American citizens so we were straightforward. But as my husband is a British citizen, he had to apply for a temporary visa, know as an ESTA. We have done this many times in the past and it is usually a ten-minute process.

 

Not this time. They have added a line which now reads, “Have you been in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan…“

 

He applied for this ESTA in January and was given the response, “PENDING DECiSION. We will get back to you soon.” That was January. No decision has been made and there is no way to contact the department of Homeland Security to explain why he was in Mosul for six weeks on two occasions.

 

We are just another separated family, which seems to be of little consequence to the Trump administration. But we know we are the lucky ones. We have choices. When we feel it isn’t fair, it just brings us a bit closer to those who really are caught in unfair systems.

When I first went to Nicaragua in 1986 I witnessed first-hand the atrocities of the US backed Contra forces that tortured and assassinated civilians, including children.  When the war ended in 1990, I never in my wildest nightmares imagined I would see the same happen again. How wrong I was.

 

In the last three months, riot police and irregular paramilitary forces armed by the Nicaraguan government have assassinated nearly 300 unarmed protesters and injured an estimated 2,500. Dozens more have been illegally detained, tortured or disappeared.

 

The level of cruelty unleashed by the Nicaraguan authorities against its own people is inhuman.  At the end of May, during the Mothers’ Day march, 15 people were brutally gunned down and killed, with dozens more wounded.  An arson attack left a 6-month-old baby and a 3-year-old girl among the dead.

 

The anti-government protests in Nicaragua began in April this year in response to social security reforms.  Within a short time, however, a broad-based civil alliance, spearheaded by students, had emerged, bringing together diverse social movements and civil society organisations who accuse Ortega of being a dictator and an assassin.  

 

After eleven years of increasingly authoritarian rule that has dismantled Nicaragua’s constitutional democracy and eroded Nicaraguans’ political, social and economic rights, their demands are clear: Ortega’s demission from power, the immediate disarming of all paramilitary forces, free and fair elections and justice and reparation for those who have been assassinated or injured. 

 

The Nicaraguan Catholic Conference of Bishops has prophetically sided with their people’s clamour for justice and democracy.  As well as convening a National Dialogue, many bishops and parish priests have opened their cathedrals and churches to offer refuge and emergency medical care for protesters attacked by paramilitary forces. Others have courageously led processions calling for an end to the violence and have successfully negotiated the release of students detained and tortured by the riot police.  In June, Pope Francis expressed his support for the Nicaraguan Bishops: “I join my brother bishops of Nicaragua in expressing sorrow for the serious violence, with dead and wounded, carried out by armed groups to repress social protests.”

 

On June 30, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans took to the streets in simultaneous “Marches of the Flowers" to honour the 20 children and adolescents slain in unforgiveable acts of violence.  In Managua, the march to lay flowers at a makeshift memorial to the dead children was fired at by the paramilitary, killing a young street vender and wounding 10 others, including an 8-year-old girl. 

 

While the “Marches of the Flowers” were taking place inside Nicaragua, vigils of support were held in more than 80 cities all over the world, as international solidarity gathers momentum.  Both SCIAF and the Scottish Government have joined their voices to those of the United Nations, the Organisation of American States, the European Parliament, the Inter American Commission for Human Rights and Amnesty international in unequivocally condemning all state sponsored violence by the Ortega regime and calling for the immediate cessation of the repression. 

 

Nicaraguans are a courageous and resilient people.  They brought down the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 through an armed revolution.  And I know that sooner rather than later, they will bring down the Ortega dictatorship through the united, nonviolent, civil insurrection they have undertaken. 

 

As I write, the words of a popular Nicaraguan song Dale una Luz resound in my head: “Shine a light for those who have pursued their freedom, struggling against the sky and against humans; shine a light for those who are so in love with living - in Nicaragua”.

 

The Nicaragua people deserve our utmost respect and unwavering solidarity.

 

:- the picture depicts a young woman in traditional Nicaraguan dress looking at a banner with the names of those who have been assassinated.