Victoria Square, Birmingham, March 2011

Women demonstrating against the cuts to ESOL English classes. The demonstration was outside Birmingham town hall and was organised by the TUC and the UCU.

Turkish demonstration against arbitrary deportations, Dalston Lane, 1984

Many Turkish people settled in Hackney in the 1970s and 1980s, they worked in the rag trade, catering and grocery shops, often having to put up with awful working and housing conditions. Immigration officials and the police would raid these sweatshops, detain those who had overstayed their visas and then seek to deport them. Local communities would be outraged when this happened: schools would mount campaigns to persuade the Home Office not to deport a parent, some families were given refuge by the local church and support groups would take the issues to politicians and trade unions.

Tamil women, Walthamstow, 1990

Women from the Tamil refugee community lobby a council meeting in Walthamstow as part of a campaign for better housing.

No man’s land – Colnbrook Immigration Detention Centre, 2011

Since it opened in 2004 more than 40,000 detainees have passed through Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre. The centre, built as a Class B prison, currently holds over 380 detainees, many of whom are held for extended periods of time, sometimes for even five years or longer. None of the detainees are in the centre to serve a prison sentence, and many of them do not know the date of their release or removal. There are currently approximately 2500 people detained under immigration law in the UK. Under this law, a person can be detained for excessive and unlimited periods of time.

The reasons for detaining someone for a longer period of time vary from a failed asylum application to a minor criminal offense, but the result in many cases is a person stuck in a state of limbo.

Not accepted by the UK and often not recognized by their country of origin, a person detained can neither leave Britain nor be released, gradually becoming invisible and stateless.