I stood in front of the visitors’ door of Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, near Bedford, waiting for a rubber-gloved guard to unlock a door, check my fingerprints, pat-search me, unlock another door, let me into a large room, and then lock me in. Memories of visiting my parents in South African jails, of gates and turning keys, resounded. The memories knocked again, and loudly, as I watched a child dressed in pink skipping through a door that had just been unlocked. But this time, while I was still the visitor, the child was the imprisoned.
In the week that the solicitor of an eight-year-old Iranian boy, having challenged the legality of his detention, secured his release from Yarl’s Wood at the high court, 36 other children remained in detention. Marie, who “celebrated” her third birthday in Yarl’s Wood, and her baby brother, John, are two of them. They are the children of Elizabeth Kiwunga Rushamba, a Ugandan asylum-seeker, and this is Marie’s second stay. Children can only be held for more than 28 days with ministerial authorisation: by the time I visited, Marie and John had been in for 57. With Elizabeth’s bail application pending, she has no idea how long they will be incarcerated.
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