Friends resist reopening of Campsfield House
'he Home Office plans to reopen the centre in 2023 as a new immigration removal centre has also been criticised by community groups.'
Quakers in Oxfordshire are campaigning against the reopening of a notorious immigration detention centre.
The Campsfield House centre in Kidlington, near Oxford, shut in 2018 after long-running campaigns involving Quakers and years of problems, including riots, escapes, hunger strikes and a teenage suicide.
The Home Office plans to reopen the centre in 2023 as a new immigration removal centre has also been criticised by community groups, Oxford City Council, and Lib Dem MP Layla Moran, as well as the Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN).
Bridget Walker, of QARN and member of Oxford Against Immigration Detention (formerly the Close Campsfield Campaign), said: ‘The Close Campsfield Campaign was a long haul and now we are in it again.’
She said that the group was opposed to all immigration detention.
Layla Moran, the MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, who has started a petition against the Campsfield reopening plans, said the community ‘will be incredibly dismayed’.
‘This disgraceful decision reflects at best a failure of policy and at worst complete heartlessness from the Home Office.
‘Locking people up for months on end – without giving them any idea how long they’ll be detained – is inhumane and unnecessary.’
MP Tom Pursglove, minister for Justice and Tackling Illegal Migration, said the new centre would ensure there was enough detention capacity to ‘safely accommodate individuals ahead of removal’.
But according to the Quakers in Britain website, ‘the government’s own Shaw Review has labelled conditions in detention centres unsafe, with thousands of vulnerable people detained for prolonged periods’.
Forty-one per cent of detainees said they felt unsafe, in the final inspection of the 282-bed facility before it shut.
The average length of detention was fifty-five days, but some were held for ‘excessive periods, with the longest detention at one year, five months’.
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