Yarl’s Wood officer sacked over pregnancy claims

An officer at an immigration removal centre has been sacked following claims that he got a detainee pregnant. He is the ninth detention custody officer in Yarl’s Wood to have been dismissed in the last four and a half years.

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Source:Bedfordshire-news.co.uk

Pilot scheme to accelerate deportations launched

By Alan Travis

Immigration officials charged with carrying out the government’s pledge to end the detention of children in immigration centres have launched a scheme designed to deport them and their families from the country within weeks.

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Staff at Yarl’s Wood criticised for child abuse case

A report into a child abuse case in Yarl’s Wood detention centre, in which one child may have been subject to abuse by another, has criticised staff, police, the UKBA and Serco for failing to investigate the case appropriately.

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Detainees beaten: UKBA bosses to be quizzed

The Guardian – Senior Home Office officials will be questioned this week over allegations that women inside Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre were assaulted by staff using riot shields.

The Observer has gathered a series of testimonies from detainees inside the Bedfordshire centre who claimed they had witnessed women being beaten and injured during a disturbance this month.

One image, taken inside Yarl’s Wood on a mobile phone, reveals extensive bruising to a woman’s shoulder and legs allegedly caused by staff during the incident on 8 February, days after dozens of asylum seekers instigated a hunger strike over the length of their detention. Another image shows injuries to a detainee’s finger after a guard had allegedly slammed a window on her hand.

On Tuesday, Lin Homer, chief executive of the UK Border Agency, and John Vine, the agency’s chief inspector, are expected to be questioned by the home affairs select committee over the claims, which are denied by staff.

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Yarl’s Wood Hunger Strikers Speak

The Guardian – Twenty women at Yarl’s Wood ­detention centre in Bedford have been on hunger strike for two and a half weeks in protest at their treatment by the immigration ­authorities. Here, one of them, Denise McNeil, tells her story:

 I have been on hunger strike for more than a fortnight. I feel weak and get terrible headaches. A ­doctor says I should eat, but I am still refusing food. I can’t sleep because I am woken every hour of the night when the light goes on and somebody here checks on me.

The women have been through terrible experiences – some are survivors of rape and torture – but we are treated like criminals. When we staged a protest two weeks ago, we were locked in a corridor, with no water or toilet facilities. After two hours, some women felt sick. One had an asthma attack and we begged the officers to let her out, but they refused. Since then, I have been detained in isolation.

I came to the UK from Jamaica in April 2000. My brother had been murdered by a gang, and my sister was going to be a witness at the trial – then she was killed too. I realised I would be murdered if I stayed, so I came to Britain. My son, then seven, joined me a few months later.

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Don’t deny this detention damage

The Guardian – Uniformed men break down your door, burst in, shout at your children: “Get up! Get up!” You may pack a few belongings. Your boy needs a wee. The woman in uniform watches over him in case of … what? Your children are in danger and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do to protect them.

Sir Al Aynsley-Green’s new report on children banged up at Yarl’s Wood has survived government attempts to neuter it – but only just. Having badgered the children’s commissioner into stressing the positive, the Home Office yesterday issued a “response to criticism” including direct statements, “not to be attributed as direct statements”, that misrepresent the report in order to undermine public confidence in its accuracy.

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Yarl’s Wood: Detained children face ‘extreme distress’

The Guardian – Children held at an immigration detention centre face “extremely distressing” arrest and transportation procedures, and are subjected to prolonged and sometimes repeated periods of detention, according to a damning report by the Children’s Commissioner.

In a report that prompted an angry response from the UK Border Agency (UKBA), Sir Al Aynsley-Green highlighted concerns over “significant areas” of healthcare for the 1,000 children held in the Yarl’s Wood centre every year.

They include a failure to assess “even at an elementary level” the general psychological wellbeing of a child on arrival and a failure to recognise psychological harm when faced with dramatic changes in a child’s behaviour. The report highlighted the cases of one four-year-old boy who appeared withdrawn, wetting when previously dry, and an eight-year-old previously happy boy who had become sad, skipped school, lost his appetite, slept poorly and screamed in the night.

Aynsley-Green concluded that the poor care and unacceptable delays in the case of a three-year-old child with a fractured arm was symptomatic of a failure to provide a standard of NHS care that any British citizen could expect. The child had been examined by a nurse hours after a fall, but was not seen by a doctor until 15 hours later and, five hours after that, was taken to hospital. The report also highlighted an allegation, disputed by the UKBA, that a 10-year-old girl had her head banged against the wall by an officer to wake her up and then attempted self-harm by swallowing shower gel.

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Yarl’s Wood Hunger Strikers Illtreated

The Guardian – Pressure is mounting for an inquiry after female hunger strikers at Yarl’s Wood described squalid conditions and made an allegation of racism at the immigration detention centre.

As the Home Office admitted improvements were needed at the Bedfordshire centre, it emerged that four “ringleaders” had been transferred to prison.

About 70 women were detained in an airless corridor without water or toilet facilities on Monday, three days after the start of the hunger strike.

“It is essential for the integrity of the asylum system that there is proper verification of exactly what happened last Monday at Yarl’s Wood,” said the Tory MP for North East Bedfordshire, Alistair Burt. “There should be an independent inquiry or at least independent report, possibly through the chief inspector of prisons.”

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Cheryl Laws fights deportation

By Miranda Wilson

A young woman is facing deportation to the Philippines, miles away from her partner and young daughter.

Cheryl Laws, who is 29, spends her days at Yarl’s Wood removal centre waiting to find out if she will be next. If her appeal to stay in the UK fails, her family say, she’ll be forced to move thousands of miles away from her 9-year-old daughter, a UK national who lives with her father in Kent. Cheryl, who was born in the Philippines, moved to Malta in 1998 where she met her now ex-husband, who’s British, and had her daughter, Jasmine. They moved to the UK in 2001 and eventually settled in Bournemouth where Cheryl worked as a nurse in a local hospital. Three years later the marriage ended, which is when Cheryl’s troubles began. She started using drugs, became addicted to cocaine and then moved on to dealing, heavily influenced by a new and negative relationship, says her boyfriend Daniel Brookes. In February 2008 Cheryl was convicted of conspiracy to supply a Class A drug and sentenced to five years in prison. This conviction means Cheryl now faces deportation to the Philippines.

‘She was a law-abiding citizen. Her life has been destroyed by the nine months she spent being dragged into a life of drugs. Cheryl did wrong, she knows this. No one’s arguing with this. She was convicted of a crime and has served two-and-a-half years of her sentence,’ says Daniel, who’s leading the fight against Cheryl’s deportation. He says she faces a double punishment simply for not being born in Britain and that as well as serving time in prison at HMP Send she now faces a further sentence: life without her daughter. ‘It will tear the family apart. Her daughter would be absolutely devastated. She’s the one who will suffer from the deportation along with me and my son who has also become close to Cheryl.’

‘She’s a fantastic woman who’s re-educated herself in prison, has a new career as a fitness trainer and has a good relationship with her daughter and me. Why are we being punished? It’s unfair that violent criminals are allowed back into society and she’s being removed when she’s no threat to anyone. She’s been rehabilitated, it makes no sense to send her away. Her life is here. She hasn’t lived in the Philippines for more than ten years.’ Daniel says their only hope is that Cheryl’s right to family life, embedded in the European Convention of Human Rights, will be recognised.

Cheryl was due to be deported on 6 November . A judicial review lodged by her lawyer means she remains in Yarl’s Wood for now. A bail hearing is due to take place on 16 November.

The deportation of foreign nationals with criminal convictions has increased significantly in the UK over the last four years. There were a record number of 5,400 deportations last year, up from 1,000 in 2005. The Home Office figures fall in line with a pledge made by Gordon Brown in 2007 that any foreign national convicted of a crime would ‘be deported from our country’.

Read about the what is happening to foreign national prisoners across Europe in the latest issue of the European Race Bulletin.

Detention of disabled children condemned

Prison inspectors have condemned the treatment of children held for deportation at an immigration detention centre.
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