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.