Who, Why, When
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In practice, there are three broad groups of people subject who may be detained for immigration reasons:
People who are detained on arrival, pending examination of their case and a decision on whether to grant, cancel, or refuse leave to enter. Increasingly, this includes people who are seeking sanctuary in the UK. People can be detained at any stage in their asylum claim, and pending their removal if their claim is refused.
People who have overstayed a visa or grant of leave; who have been refused leave to enter; who have been unable to observe conditions attached to their visa or who have allegedly used deception in their application for leave to remain. Anyone reasonably suspected of falling into one of these categories can be detained, along with family members subject to immigration control, pending examination of their case, a decision on removal, and their actual removal from the UK.
People who are subject to deportation action as a result of a criminal conviction. Anyone who does not have British citizenship status, who has received a sentence of 12 months or more, is subject to a deportation order.
These categories are fluid and interconnected, for reasons described below.
There are a number of reasons that someone might find themselves in any one of the situations described above.
The exact number of people without a regular immigration status in the UK is unknown. A 2017 report by Pew Research Centre estimated the number to be 800,000 to 1.2 million [1]. This is the result of a series of restrictive immigration policies which have made it extremely difficult for some people to gain lawful residence or to claim asylum in the UK via a safe and regular route. Exemplary of this, the hostile environment policies introduced in 2012 were explicitly intended to make life so difficult for people without a regular status in the UK that they would be forced to leave. These policies extended to all walks of life, involving healthcare professionals, employers and landlords in the process of immigration checks and pushing people to the fringes of their communities. These policies even went so far as to impact people originally from the Caribbean who had the legal right to be in the UK, in what is now known as the “Windrush Scandal”, and who were denied access to healthcare, lost their jobs and were even wrongfully detained or deported. In addition to restrictive policies and a lack of legal routes, the complexity of immigration legislation requires legal advice. Yet, a recent report from Refugee Action [2] on low-cost and free immigration advice found a serious shortage of legal advice in most parts of England and Wales and some areas where there was only one qualified legal aid caseworker in an asylum dispersal city. Paying for legal advice is not possible for many, notwithstanding the cost of visa applications.
Instead of creating pathways for people to be able to regularise their status and positively contribute to UK communities, people are increasingly criminalised for immigration related reasons by government policies. As a result, in a process that has been coined "crimmigration", immigration and criminalisation have become closely connected. The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford describes how “immigration law has created an increased number of actions that are legally defined as crimes” [3] a process which escalated between 1999 and 2009. Convictions for immigration offences include: assisting unlawful immigration; seeking leave to enter or remain or postponement of revocation by deception; and working without the legal right to do so. The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 increased the penalty for people convicted of illegal entry or residence, if the offence took place on or after 28 June 2022, from a maximum of 6 months in prison to a maximum of 12 months or 4 years in prison (if the case goes to the Crown Court). A sentence of 12 months or more results in the person being subject to ‘automatic deportation’. It also leads to the person being classed as a “serious criminal” following amendments made in the Nationality and Borders Act to the definition of “a particularly serious crime” which is now defined as one which attracts a sentence of at least 12 months. And so, it is now writ in law that people who are simply seeking asylum, and who do not arrive by the limited regular routes that exist to the UK, maybe considered “serious criminals”.
Lastly, UKs immigration system and who, as such, is “detainable” cannot be separated from issues of racism, systemic inequalities and Britain’s colonial legacy. Distinctions which are drawn in the UK immigration system stem from ties to previously colonised countries whose populations - post-independence - were no longer able to freely enter the UK (The Immigration Act 1971 and The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962). This resulted in new forms of immigration control, including detention, whilst visa routes were opened up for "old" Commonwealth countries with predominantly white populations, such as New Zealand and Australia [4]. Who belongs and who doesn’t, as presented in the media, through political rhetoric and what is then written into legislation, is closely tied to ideas of race and racial hierarchies. Read more about the tangled history of detention and colonialism in this letter from people with lived experience of detention [5] and blog from GDWG’s Refugee Tales, “The Better Imagined” [6] on Racism and Immigration Detention. As quoted in their blog:
“The legacies of British colonialisation and imperialism have shaped the contemporary practices of detention and who ends up in one of the UK’s [immigration removal centres]. To challenge immigration detention, and work to denaturalise it as an appropriate or logical state response to mass migration and concerns about security, it is necessary to attend to issues or race and racism.” –
As a visitor you will meet people in detention who are at very different stages in their immigration journey and who have been in the UK for differing lengths of time.
Some people you meet in detention will have never set foot in the UK other than in the custody of the police or the Home Office, having been picked up on arrival at a port, for example after crossing the channel or Irish border. You could meet people who were detained on reporting at an immigration reporting centre or who have been apprehended during an immigration raid. Or, you could meet people who have served a criminal sentence and are held under immigration powers after finishing their sentence.
People detained may have originally entered the UK entirely lawfully, then overstayed their visa, moving from one immigration status to another, with leave to enter or remain at the beginning of their stay but without it later on. Still others may have lived, worked, or studied in the UK for years, possibly decades or since they were a child, and consider the UK to be their home.
Whatever someone's journey and reasons for being in detention, we challenge hierarchies in our immigration system that create ideas of who does and doesn’t deserve to belong. As set out in , we are inclusive in our support to people in immigration detention and do not discriminate on any basis.
