Shut Down Yarl’s Wooden – Saturday twelfth March 2016 noticed one of many largest protests outdoors the Immigration Detention Centre at Yarl’s Wooden with nicely over a thousand folks from across the nation waving and shouting help to the ladies asylum seekers held indefinitely inside, who responded enthusiastically by shouting and waving again from the jail blocks behind the excessive fence, hindered by home windows that hardly open. There have been many among the many protesters who had themselves been locked up in Yarls Wooden or different detention centres.
My day started badly, with a cancelled prepare after which a coach driver for the 5 or 6 mile journey from Bedford Station to the remoted jail who received misplaced and took us for a 20 mile thriller tour by rural Bedfordshire, which means we arrived relatively late for the protest.
We arrived simply in time for the ultimate couple of minutes of the rally by Motion for Justice, the organisers of the protest, outdoors the locked gates of the Twinwoods Enterprise Centre. An shortly after the protesters set off for the lengthy march down the street and alongside a public footpath to a subject on a slight rise adjoining the jail the place the primary protest was to happen.
It was dry and sunny, however there had been per week of rain and the fields we walked previous had been filled with puddles and the rise in entrance of the 20 foot jail fence was extraordinarily treacherous and laborious to climb. Alongside the steel fence was a concrete path however then a couple of ft of churned up mud earlier than the slippery slope.
On the backside the decrease 10ft of the fence is stable steel sheeting, so there you don’t have any view of the jail. however could make a substantial noise by banging or kicking the fence. On prime of the slope you may see the higher flooring of the closest jail block, and from there we may make out these prisoners who had managed to get to the home windows and had been shouting greetings and a few holding out notices although the small hole – simply massive sufficient for a hand to undergo – that the home windows open.
Sadly the home windows replicate the sky and within the brilliant climate we may solely see dimly these inside. Additional alongside the rise we may see a bit of of the bottom ground of the detention centre, and right here the views had been a bit of clearer. This a part of the immigration jail was then getting used for households, whereas the remaining ws a ladies’s jail.
The regime in immigration detention differs from that in our different prisons and in a single respect is worse. These inside are held indefinitely and don’t have any manner of understanding after they is likely to be launched. And their detention could be very prolonged with one girl held there for 3 years much less a few days. Many have seen this as completely unacceptable and known as for a most size of detention of 28 days as is the case in another nations.
However the detainees alhtough stored as prisoners are allowed to have cellphones which they should talk with solicitors and others coping with their immigration circumstances. And the protesters had been in a position to cellphone a number of the ladies inside and the calls might be linked to the general public deal with system delivered to the protest so they might inform one thing of their tales.
These held in immigration detention aren’t criminals and few have or would commit any legal offences. Many certainly have been victims of legal assaults, violence and rape, or face these if they’re deported again to their dwelling nations. All of them wish to be allowed to dwell and work right here, to contribute their expertise to our nation and pay our taxes. There isn’t a must maintain them locked away. However we have now a racist immigration regime that treats them as criminals and liars and reveals little proof of any humanity – however a lot of indifference, incompetence and pointless delays.
The goverment outsources their detention to non-public firms and varied investigations and studies have proven the dearth of care, mistreatment and even sexual harassment and violence on this and different centres. Quite than shutting them down and transferring to a extra humane system the federal government have now moved those that may in any other case been in Yarl’s Wooden to a much more distant location to make protests tougher to organise.
The photographs and textual content, together with some captions, on My London Diary inform extra about what what occurred on the protest: Shut Down Yarl’s Wooden.
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Tags: #SetHerFree, 20ft fence, deportation, detainees, immigration, immigration detention, immigration jail, indefinite detention, march, psychological torture rape, MfJ, Motion for Justice, mud, no to deportation, peter Marshall, jail fence, prisoners, protest, racism, racist detention, scapegoating of immigrants, sexual abuse, Shut Down Yarls Wooden, Sisters In opposition to State Violence, handled as criminals, handled as liars, Yarl’s Wooden
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