The Psychological Harm of Immigration Detention

Freya Morgan is an Inner Temple Major Scholar and Bar Vocational Studies student at City, University of London. She has worked in public law and policy at Reprieve, Bhatt Murphy and the British Council. Freya is currently a caseworker with Bail for Immigration Detainees and was recently a guest on BBC Radio Bristol as part of their Solidarity Fund campaign.

The Home Office has a legacy of harsh arbitrary policy on immigration detention. For the last 50 years, it has operated an internal detention estate in the UK with conditions that often equate to inhuman or degrading treatment, if not torture. The UK is the only country in Europe that indefinitely holds people in detention for administrative purposes. Under the Hardial Singh principles, the UK is currently bound to only use its detention powers on those facing imminent deportation. Yet these powers are routinely exercised against all types of individuals who do not possess Right of Abode in the UK.

The Home Office acknowledges the harmful impact of detention through its Adults at Risk framework (AaR). The AaR identifies specific groups who are at particular risk in immigration detention: torture and trafficking survivors; people with mental and physical disabilities; victims of gender-based violence; adults suffering with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); pregnant women, and people over the age of 70. Although the policy presumes that these vulnerable adults will not be detained, and strict statutory time limits exist for pregnant women and children, these individuals can (and often are) still detained if there is “a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable timeframe”. These conditions give rise to the sad and inevitable circumstances like those of Alois Dvorzac, the 84-year-old man suffering with dementia who died while handcuffed to his bed. 

Even if an adult is not considered vulnerable under the AaR framework, being detained under immigration powers can make them so. Sir Stephen Shaw’s 2016 Review into the Welfare in Detention of Vulnerable Persons highlighted how “vulnerability is intrinsic to the very fact of detention, and an individual’s degree of vulnerability is not constant but changes as circumstances change.” Detention centres are traumatic spaces and there is clear evidence that the longer a person spends in immigration detention, the more severe and persistent their mental illness is likely to be, even after release. The uncertainty of immigration status, conditions in detention and the process of certifying identification can all contribute to post-migration PTSD among asylum seekers.

Under the Hardial Singh principles - the authority currently governing the period of time that a person can be detained - the UK’s powers are confined to incarcerating those facing imminent deportation. This is supported by the UNHCR’s Detention Guidelines, Guideline 4, that makes clear detention must not be arbitrary (arbitrary defined as “not only lawfulness, but also… inappropriateness, injustice and lack of predictability).” And yet, there are individuals being detained for months or years without release. Bail for Immigration Detainees, a legal advice charity supporting people in detention, successfully represented a man in 2022 who was detained for 1,897 days due to the symptoms of his schizophrenia and his lack of access to legal aid or representation.

Quantitative evidence illustrates the psychological crisis taking place in UK detention. A Freedom of Information request in 2017 revealed that there were approximately 2 suicide attempts per day in detention and no less than 159 attempts in the period April-June 2018 alone.  By 2019, over 3,000 detainees had been on hunger strike.  In September 2020, at least 26 people were deported while under Assessment Care in Detention and Teamwork (ACDT) detention orders designed for individuals at risk of self-harm and suicide.  In December 2020, the Independent Monitoring Board expressed “serious concerns” about Brook House Immigration Removal Centre after their report identified that one-third of all detainees had Rule 35 risk assessments. Many people have died due to the harmful impact of detention centres: Joy Gardner, Prince Fosu, Lukasz Debowski, Ahmed Kabia, Michal Netyks, Carlington Spencer and Marcin Gwoździński. Manuel Bravo ended his own life to prevent his 13-year-old son from being deported from the UK. Jimmy Mubenga gasped “I can’t breathe” while being unlawfully restrained for 40 minutes before he died from asphyxiation.

Those detained also become easier to isolate legally and geographically. Family members often struggle to locate their loved ones because people in detention are frequently moved between sites, often at night and to remote locations. Fewer than 50% of people in detention have access to legal advice, meaning they are otherwise unprotected against a consciously hostile environment. The lack of judicial oversight over the detention estate, outbreaks of diseases that have been eradicated in the UK since the 1940s, solitary confinement, and breaches of the 1951 Refugee Convention all demonstrate how deprivation of liberty for immigration purposes is psychologically inhumane. It urgently raises the question as to what extent the detention estate is even necessary. Certainly, other mechanisms are available. The UNHCR’s Guideline 4.3 provides examples of more efficient means of immigration monitoring such as community supervision and reporting conditions. The Home Office’s Immigration Bail policy stipulates that these measures are considered as conditions for grants of immigration bail. This emulates the UK’s approach to detention: less stringent measures are incidental, detention is the default.

The UK taxpayer pays the price for this damaging policy. Between 2018 and 2022, the Government paid £24.4 million to 914 victims of unlawful detention: an average of £25,000 per day. That is in addition to the £120 million already spent setting up the failed Rwanda removal scheme (and the £190,000 that the Home Office was willing to pay per person to deport those individuals, including £105,000 directly to the Rwandan Government), the £399 million spent to reopen the Haslar and Campsfield sites and the £9 million spent in 2020 – equating to £13,354 per person – on deportation flights. These were often on commercial aircraft with up to 350-person capacity that sometimes carried as few as 4 people at a time. Maintaining the detention facilities has been a significant cost with itself; in 2017, the Home Office paid roughly £1 million per month to G4S for the Brook House contract alone.

The detention estate is an inordinately expensive way to inflict psychological harm. Its current operating state is so very far away from being the baseline “humane and dignified” conditions required and it is matter of humanitarian importance that its impact is shared with the public. Lord Bach summarised the matter succinctly when he asked the House of Lords:

“Think about it for a moment: the proposition that, in our country, and person, whether adult, child, pregnant woman or victim of trafficking, can be deprived of their liberty and, at the same time, of proper legal advice is horrific, unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

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