Buried on page 89 of the United Kingdom Home Office’s annual accounts for 2016-2017 is a seemingly anodyne entry under “special payments”. The line details that the Home Office, in a single year, paid £1.8 million (Dh9.17 million) in legal compensation for 32 cases of unlawful detention. More bewildering than the number is the fact that there is no further explanation in the document.
The frequency and banal cruelty of unlawful detention has reached a new level of inhumanity. This isn’t incompetence or the sputtering of a system overburdened. Unlawful detention, often in poor conditions and in a vacuum of legal rights, has become the enforcement tool of a failing and punitive immigration policy. These are not just mistakes: They are human rights abuses, and they are now such an integral part of the system that undermine the credibility of all immigration enforcement.
The risk of being sued is worth it sometimes, because detention appears to be really quite convenient. It has a sort of prison fridge, where the cases can cool off and then eventually be marked for rejection or deportation. Take Paulette Wilson, who has lived in the UK for 50 years, but was held in Yarl’s Wood detention centre for a week before almost being forced on to a flight deporting her to Jamaica, a country she has never visited since arriving in Britain at the age of 10. Only a last-minute intervention from her MP and a charity prevented a forced removal. And it is the absence of last-minute interventions that the Home Office depends on to meet targets. With the Home Office, your rights only exist insofar as you know you have them, or have the ability to exercise them.
This tactic of brinkmanship is central to how the UK Home Office works. The hope is that immigrants do not have the money, understanding or support to challenge decisions before it is too late. In 2013, I spent months with lawyers preparing to appeal against a wrong decision to remove me from the country. Days before the court date, the decision was overturned with no explanation. There were smaller fish to fry.
The situation has been escalating for years. Theresa May, then Britain’s home secretary, proudly stated in 2013 that her aim was to make the country a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. Since then, the government has introduced ever more aggressive and intrusive checks. The problem is, the institution that is applying these measures is routinely incompetent, financially extractive and pugnacious. The hostile environment net is sweeping up not only illegal migrants, but most of their rights and the rights of those who are not illegal, tainting the entire immigration system. The select committee report cites a 10 per cent error rate in a Home Office list of “disqualified people”.
And this is even before the Home Office has to deal with Brexit-related immigration registration. Celia Clarke, director of Bail for Immigration Detainees, which challenges detention cases, told me that Brexit will effectively break the system. “We are on the brink of a real crisis,” she said. “There are three million EU [European Union] nationals whose status is still undecided and will need to be regularised. What is the capacity and capability of the Home Office? How are they going to process third-country citizen status of EU residents and all the derivative rights for their families?”
The UK Home Office is ill-equipped to administer an ideologically aggressive anti-immigration agenda and a fundamental rethink is needed. The British government needs to drop the unrealistic “tens of thousands” migration target and make an effort to measure the actual scale of illegal immigration. And it should scrap detention as an enforcement tool. Until that happens, and with Brexit looming, thousands of people are staring into an abyss.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist.
