"Some have tried to jump off the buildings, others try to hang themselves in the rooms, one tried to hurt himself in the kitchen, and one took too many pills"
Amir, on the unfolding mental health crisis at Wethersfield, where around 580 migrants are being housed at the 80-year-old site, where asylum seekers can be held for 6-9 months.
Evidence shows that the only way to stop Channel crossings is to offer safe routes for refugees to claim asylum in the UK. But will the next Prime Minister support safe routes?
Use the Care4Calais link below to email all the party leaders in the coming election.
"We are left with little confidence in the Home Office’s ability to implement the Rwanda partnership and its understanding of the costs, particularly given its track record in delivering other major programmes"
Public Accounts Committee
They're not "mistakes". They were deliberately cruel schemes to set up pseudo prisons, with their mates creaming off lucrative contracts.
"Officers train for handling those who will not comply on crash mats in rows of tents they call “dojos”.
We were not allowed to watch more physical training and the use of cuffs, waist and leg restraints...
It takes three officers to escort one detainee, two in seats either side, the other across the aisle offering support.
All three fly to the destination"
Inside the secret UK govt Rwanda training facility. Sickening.
The Rwandan government has barred Clementine de Montjoye, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, from entering the country, prompting accusations that officials are seeking to dodge independent scrutiny just weeks before the UK government is due to send asylum seekers there for the first time.
Home Office officials fear the number of migrants deported on the first Rwanda flight could be in single figures because of legal challenges.
The concerns are believed to be behind moves to expand the scheme to include ALL failed asylum seekers on top of the initial cohort of 5,700 migrants so far earmarked for deportation.
Given Rwanda only has room for a few hundred currently, this is arrant nonsense and performative cruelty.
#Disconnection#CellPhones#Migrants#AsylumSeekers: "This article investigates online connection and disconnection practices among migrants and asylum seekers. It draws from an ethnography of three Sicilian reception centres that hosted migrants and asylum seekers between September and November 2020. We show how migrants, driven by different migratory motivations, enact different mobile connection and disconnection practices. We argue that these are characterised by the different affective meanings that migrants and asylum seekers attach to mobile connection and disconnection and by the different value they place on the public and private dimensions of their lives. By offering a multifaceted portrait of the mobile connection and disconnection practices of different categories of migrants, this article also contributes to: (1) media and migration studies, by showing that there are substantial differences in online connection practices and smartphone use between asylum seekers and migrants and (2) to disconnection studies, by highlighting the nuances that exist within disconnection practices among non-privileged social groups, such as migrants and asylum seekers. We show that they cannot afford to practise typically Western, urban and elitist forms of disconnection; however, they too are able to practise specific forms of disconnection, paradoxically afforded by staying connected. The article aims to contextualise and situate disconnection studies within different social, political, cultural and geographic contexts." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241249371
Graham King, an Essex businessman who won government contracts paying his firm £3.5m a day for transporting and accommodating asylum seekers has been named among the 350 richest people in the UK.
The Home Office is dealing with growing fallout as asylum seekers go into hiding or flee across the border to Ireland.
Predictable and ineffective:
"I was an asylum seeker in 2020 when the Home Office was trying to deport as many asylum seekers as possible to European countries they had passed through before Brexit started. Some asylum seekers went into hiding then & I can see that it is happening again because of Rwanda”