Solidarity Within and Against Detention

Introducing the research

The current climate presents new and urgent challenges for the movement against immigration detention and in solidarity with those detained.

Recent years have seen government proposals to expand immigration detention with the intention of deterring illegalised migration and expediting deportations. In response to the manufactured ‘crises’ of Channel boat crossings and rising numbers of asylum seekers accommodated in hotels, and in conjunction with the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and Illegal Migration Act 2023, the UK government has sought to enhance its powers to detain people, remove rights for people in detention and those seeking asylum, enlarge the detention estate, and use ex-military sites for the ‘non-detained accommodation’ of asylum seekers on a mass scale.

This is a notable reversal of a trend over the last decade that saw detention centres close down amid sustained pressure from civil society groups. This pressure also led to the commissioning of two damning reports from the All-Party Parliamentary Group in 2015 and the Shaw Review in 2016, calling for the introduction of a time limit for detention, a general reduction in its use, and an increase in ‘alternatives’.

At the same time, conditions of detention across these diverse sites are worsening as numbers in detention expand, leading to an increase in incidents of self-harm and widespread protests by detained people. Most recently, the 2023 Brook House Inquiry found a ‘toxic culture’ of violence, aggression, and dehumanisation within the detention centre located at Gatwick and critiqued the prison-like architecture for being ‘inherently unsuitable’ for ‘humane’ immigration detention (VII 337).

The current climate presents new and urgent challenges for the movement against immigration detention and in solidarity with those detained. In light of this, Dr Thom Tyerman (Researcher at University of Warwick and Coordinator of Manchester Immigration Detainee Support Team) and AVID (the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detention) joined together to begin a process of research, reflection, and dialogue with the wider movement with the following aims: to map the diversity and scope of the current movement, strengthen connections between groups, and create a space to collectively learn from each other and share ideas, resources, and tactics.

As organisers directly involved in work with visitor groups, we had particular interest in understanding the role that visiting and practical solidarity plays in the wider ecosystem of organising against detention. We also knew from experience that groups focussed on practical support can sometimes feel like they are in fire-fighting mode, struggling to ‘take a breath’ to reflect, connect and strategise. So, we felt excited to be able to offer this opportunity to groups who struggle to carve out time.

To facilitate this reflection and strategising we organised two workshops (funded by the University of Warwick) in London and Manchester over the summer of 2023, bringing together groups from across the UK involved in different kinds of solidarity work and campaigning focussed on immigration detention.

This included campaign groups working locally to resist new detention centres, visitors groups providing practical and emotional support to people detained, migrant-led campaigning and advocacy organisations, groups focussing on supporting LGBTQ people impacted by border violence and the hostile environment, grassroots activist groups, and national campaigning organisations. In total, 30 participants attended on behalf of 14 different groups, with half coming from groups who provide direct support to people in detention through visiting and casework support. A number of these groups straddled both practical support and campaigning work.

We hope the key issues and themes arising from these workshops will inform the parameters of future research and strategy development activities. We believe that research should aim to contribute to the goals of social movements, helping to develop a clearer understanding of their work and ultimately better practice. In doing so, we see ourselves as building on important moments created for cross-movement reflection and strategising, including BID’s event on Resisting the Expansion of the Detention Estate in January 2023 and NEON’s (2019) ‘Hostile Environment Movement Study’, and we also recognise that similar processes of reflection and discussion are ongoing in different ways throughout the movement.

The workshops were divided into three main sections:

1) a mapping exercise to learn about who, what, where, and how participants were involved in the movement against detention

2) a reflection on issues of power in our work and networks

3) an attempt to think forward about how we can build the movement and envision alternatives/an end to detention.

As always, the conversations were varied and went in directions we couldn’t have foreseen, and we developed the format from one workshop to another in light of feedback. For example, concerns were raised in the first workshop about the place of professionalised research in social movements, so we decide to make the politics of social movement research a central part of the discussion in the second workshop.

What we present below is a summary of the key themes that emerged across both workshops. We hope that it offers a valuable glimpse into our current moment, the challenges and opportunities it presents, aa well as raising some important questions for us to grapple with. We end with an invitation to continue the process of dialogue in order to build towards a world without detention.

Emerging themes

> The relationship between research and activism

It was proposed that researchers should first ask themselves if their research is actually necessary, who is calling for it, and how it will strengthen the aims and objectives of the movement against detention.

The production of knowledge is deeply implicated in questions of power and positionality. How we understand the world informs what we see as possible or necessary to do within it. For instance, how the government frames migration and asylum in terms of national security, criminality, deception, and ‘invasion’, leads them to justify harsh law and order responses of detention and deterrence in the name of ‘honest tax-paying citizens’. Who gets to claim ownership of ideas and speak with authority on political issues, as well as be recompensed for the labour of knowledge creation, also often reflects and entrenches existing unequal relations in society, for instance of class, race, gender, and citizenship status.

In the workshops we asked about participants’ experiences and perceptions of research in relation to their work and the wider anti-detention movement. Research was seen as having a useful role to play in various ways, from helping to identify policy trends or harmful practices in detention that can feed into legal, advocacy, or campaign strategies. Creating an authoritative knowledge base is often crucial for challenging the legitimacy of detention whether in individual cases (for example, using medical assessments to evidence someone’s experiences of torture for an asylum claim or request release from detention) or when raising awareness of the harms of the system as a whole.

Research has a valuable educative function, helping us to counter harmful public narratives and misrepresentation about people in detention and the arguments about its necessity. Here, for example, testimony of people with experience of detention can be powerful in providing alternative narratives about how detention works and its violent effects. Research into the underlying political economy of detention, revealing the corporate interests, profits, and exploitation involved, also allows us to see how detention serves other purposes than those usually stated by politicians. In this way, research can help us uncover and publicise the true human and economic costs of detention.  

Research can also help us within the movement to reflect on our own assumptions and to foreground overlooked and marginalised groups within detention who might face specific struggles, such as people with disabilities. As a process that holds a mirror up to us and our practice, research can create time and space for us to pause and consider our goals, our methods, and to learn from each other and to build connections between groups and locations in ways we often don’t make time for in our day-to-day struggles.

But participants also flagged concerns with the place of researchers in the movement against detention. The professionalisation of research, especially in academia, can lead to extractive and self-promotional practices that treat people with lived experience of detention and grassroots groups as sources of data to be mined for their own personal gain. Policy consultations are often nothing more than tick-box exercises with little substantial ongoing consultation or practical collaboration. Gathering and sharing testimonies of the harms of immigration detention can place a big emotional burden on people with lived experience, and so participant wellbeing should always be prioritised over a desire for knowledge.  And participants discussed the need to remember that the production of more knowledge about the harms of detention in and of itself is not enough to change things but that it must be coupled with action.

It was proposed that researchers should first ask themselves if their research is actually necessary, who is calling for it, and how it will strengthen the aims and objectives of the movement against detention.  Here it is also important not to accept the professionalisation of research, and to remember that both people in detention and solidarity activists are themselves constantly doing research, learning, gathering information, disseminating knowledge, educating themselves and others to be able to better fight their own cases, navigate the detention and immigration systems, and to build political pressure against them.

> The possibility of social and political change

People spoke of the importance of building local support for campaigns while also challenging anti-immigrant motivations for local opposition as well as the ineffectiveness of nimbyism which simply sees detention centres opened elsewhere.

Other conversations in the sessions touched on the question of how it is possible to bring about social and political change. Participants asked:

What is needed to get us to a position where the presence of non-citizens is not seen as a social problem to which detention is a politically necessary or legitimate solution? Are the tools we use in our daily work sufficient to bring this about? How might they be sharpened?

Many participants emphasised the importance of changing ordinary people’s minds through constant intervention in public discourse, awareness raising and education activities. Others emphasised the need to use legal avenues and mechanisms in the courts to challenge unjust laws, policies, and practices. For others, direct action aimed at disrupting the operations of detention and deportation was both a powerful method for practically contesting immigration enforcement and an empowering activity that embodied a political refusal of its racist logic and violent effects.

Each of these come with their own limitations, whether it is working within the constraints of legal definitions and rules that are themselves highly politicised, or the risk of demonisation and heavy-handed policing that comes with direct action. The challenge is to identify the ways these approaches can  reinforce rather than undermine each other, working to chip away at the edifice of detention from different angles and at different levels.

It became clear from the discussions that a key challenge facing the anti-detention movement today is how to articulate a clear vision for an alternative to detention that has broad resonance with people in diverse locations. For instance, campaigns against the opening of individual detention centres face specific challenges in linking local reasons for opposition to wider critiques of national detention policy.  People spoke of the importance of building local support for campaigns while also challenging anti-immigrant motivations for local opposition as well as the ineffectiveness of nimbyism which simply sees detention centres opened elsewhere. An important and effective strategy identified was the articulation of alternative uses for proposed detention sites and funding, and alternative visions for what we should prioritise in our politics and the benefits this brings to local and national communities.

At a broader level, it is necessary to link the injustices of detention to other issues that matter to people such as human rights, the impacts of austerity, or the entrenchment of socio-economic inequalities in British society. In other words, we need to present an end to detention as a necessary part of a wider societal and political struggles for justice and change. Here, as participants discussed, the question remains if/how to campaign for incremental change in policies while maintaining the argument for the abolition of detention in its entirety.

> Building communities of resistance

Groups shared recent important examples of where solidarity has been built between groups to create powerful moments of resistance, including in response to the detention of 4000+ at Manston detention centre...

This leads us to another major theme arising from the workshops: the need to strengthen networks of collaboration and struggle, to develop a sense of collective identity and shared purpose as a movement. In other words, how to build communities of resistance.

This is an especially important question given the diversity of the movement in terms of the methods and tactics discussed above but also political values, mission statements, structure, and location. Some groups and organisations see their role as providing humanitarian support to people within detention and have established limited relationships with detention centre management to achieve this.  Others attempt to prefigure their abolitionist stance by refusing to engage with or rely on relationships with detention centre staff. Others position themselves somewhere in-between.

How we organise ourselves is also varied, with some groups operating as national charities with paid staff, boards of trustees and access to funding, while others maintain a predominantly voluntary and horizontal structure. Some of these groups are either led by or see themselves as working in partnership and solidarity with people at risk of/in detention, while others adopt a model that distinguishes service providers and users.

Here, participants expressed concerns that larger more professionalised NGOs can end up playing a gatekeeping function that limits the growth and impact of grassroots and lived-experience-led organisations. Furthermore, it was highlighted how geographically the network mirrors the London-centrism of British politics generally, with presence, resources, information, and focus often remaining concentrated on the capital with less engagement with other cities and regions across the country.

A central challenge facing the movement is whether groups working across these spectrums of reformism/abolitionism, professionalisation/grassroots, geographical centre/periphery can or should work together to build a thriving ecosystem for alternative ideas and practices to those of the current immigration detention system. Building networks of information and mutual aid across divides, differences, and unequal relations of power is at the heart of solidarity politics. Groups shared recent important examples of where solidarity has been built between groups to create powerful moments of resistance, including in response to the detention of 4000+ at Manston detention centre, and in the solidarity demonstrations of the Action Against Detention and Deportation Coalition.

The challenges of building a wider movement reflect similar challenges building relations between those divided by the walls of the detention centres themselves. And discussions in these workshops offered numerous inspiring examples where connection and collective action both within and outside detention worked to fight back against the harms, isolation, and disempowerment imposed on detained people, and ultimately set them free. Learning from recent successes or failures and thinking about how we can nurture the development of these communities of resistance is vital moving forward. Such communities are not necessarily harmonious, but they are necessary foundations on which to build towards a world without immigration detention.

> Lived experience leadership and movement accountability

Gatekeeping in policy-making spaces has meant that conversations around ending or reducing detention have become narrowed down to pragmatic ‘alternatives to detention’, sidelining alternative possibilities and visions of the future as articulated by migrant-led and lived experience led groups.

Across the conversations sketched above, the question of the position of people with lived experience of border violence in the movement against detention was ever present. It was clear that despite much noise about the need to be led by those directly impacted by detention, people with lived experience continue to be marginalised in most social movement organisations and NGOs, and are rarely represented in paid research, policy and campaigning roles. This confirms internal research carried out by AVID in 2021, which highlighted the many barriers people with lived experience face in entering leadership roles.

Where people with lived experience were included in research and public facing work, it was overwhelmingly for the sake of their testimonies and as ‘case studies’ rather than for their broader skills and expertise. This expertise includes the skills gained through organising and advocating with others within detention as touched on above. What’s more, gatekeeping in policy-making spaces has meant that conversations around ending or reducing detention have become narrowed down to pragmatic ‘alternatives to detention’, sidelining alternative possibilities and visions of the future as articulated by migrant-led and lived experience led groups.

Key challenges raised for the movement against immigration detention included not only how to address the racist operations of power that prevent people with lived experience ‘getting a place at the table’ when it comes to campaign strategy and policy making, but also how resources can be re-distributed to migrant and lived-experience led organisations who can operate on their own terms and formulate their own demands and visions of the future.

> The role of immigration detention visitor groups

How might the power visitors do have be joined with the power of those they visit in order to leverage immediate and wider change?

As researchers and organisers ourselves directly involved with visitor groups, we were particularly interested in the insights emerging from the workshops on the specific role that visitor groups play in the movement to end detention.

The internal tensions that some visitor groups experience in their practical solidarity work were evident in the workshops. There was a strong feeling for some that simply visiting people in detention was not enough, or even that it made them complicit in the system when it involved liaising with centre management to negotiate greater access to meet people in detention. In this context, the knowledge that others were able to campaign against detention and were in some sense speaking ‘on their behalf’ was important in enabling them to continue in their more practical role.

Visitors also shared how they experienced an intense sense of powerlessness in their role, frequently confronting the limitations of their knowledge as visitors and their ability to address the real needs of those they visited - for legal advice, for freedom, for secure status. This feeling of helplessness in the face of the system was exacerbated by their entry into the bureaucracy of the centres, where they had to wait for prolonged periods to be escorted to a visit or were refused a visit at late notice.

On the other hand, some visitors expressed the discomfort of their position of power as people who can ‘enter’ and ‘leave’ detention and the fundamentally unequal relationship they felt this establishes with the people they meet. These discussions raised important questions around how visitors might think about their own power or powerlessness in fruitful ways that strengthen the movement to end detention, rather than finding it debilitating. For example, how might the power visitors do have be joined with the power of those they visit in order to leverage immediate and wider change? And how might feelings of powerlessness in the face of the Home Office be redirected to build stronger connections with the wider movement where, through collective action, change becomes possible?

An invitation to continue the conversation

The detention system manufactures isolation for those detained but also for those who work in solidarity with them, individualising our struggles against a sprawling bureaucracy

Many participants spoke of the value they found in the simple act of coming together in these workshops, sharing experiences, challenges, strategies, feelings and making connections with other individuals and groups. The detention system manufactures isolation for those detained but also for those who work in solidarity with them, individualising our struggles against a sprawling bureaucracy and unaccountable state apparatus in ways that are designed to be disempowering. Creating spaces and channels for connection, communication, collective organising and struggle is therefore crucial for developing a movement capable of effectively confronting and challenging the continued use of immigration detention.

For us as organisers, these workshops revealed that the value of collaborative research is not only to create useful knowledge or enable strategic reflections but also, as part of the research process, to contribute to this work of strengthening relations within and across the movement itself. We hope these workshops are only the start of the conversation and we would like this to be an ongoing and open engagement.

To that end we would like to invite responses and reflections from individuals, groups and organisations working in solidarity with people facing border violence and immigration detention on our next steps as a movement:

Where do we need to focus our time and resources?

How can practical solidarity groups and campaigning or activist groups strengthen their collaboration?

How do we connect local organising and grassroots groups with national campaigns?

How do we address power dynamics within our movement that stifle lived experience leadership, and make our groups and organisations accountable to those who are directly impacted by detention?

Email us at enquiries@aviddetention.org.uk to share your response!