We are Action Against Detention and Deportations, a coalition of groups and individuals committed to ending detention, deportations and the wider “hostile environment” against migrants. Our members include people seeking sanctuary in the UK, and some are at risk of being removed to Rwanda themselves. Collectively, we have decades of experience campaigning against detention and deportation and for refugee and migrant rights.

Under the Rwanda plan people will have no opportunity to return here even if their asylum claims are successful. This is not “offshoring”, as many are calling it, but permanent expulsion. We see it for what it is: an evidently racist, punitive, and illegal move by the Conservative government.

Action Against Detention & Deportations includes the All African Women's Group - a self-help group of asylum seekers and refugees from every continent - who comment: “As African women, we know that Rwanda isn't safe. The genocide has left an indelible mark. Many of us are survivors of rape and other torture and our lives will be at risk there. Our countries have been bombed, our lands and homes destroyed, our wealth stolen. We have a right to be here.”

On the weekend before the first scheduled Rwanda flight on 14th June this year we organised a solidarity demonstration at Brook House, the detention centre in London holding many of those threatened with deportation. Hundreds of people showed up with love, compassion and rage to stand and fight alongside them.

The police tried to block the road, but that didn’t stop us. We proceeded to the centre, where we could see and hear dozens of the people imprisoned there, who were gathered in the courtyard, waving at us as we waved at them. Together, we spent an emotional few hours - talking to each other, chanting with each other. Connecting with each other across the fence.

We were moved by the chants rising up from inside Brook House: “No Rwanda! No Rwanda!” We were inspired by the bravery of one man who spoke to us on the phone about the injustice and inhumanity they are facing and pleading all of us on the outside to resist. We let them know that they are not alone and that we would fight alongside them. Our resistance is rooted in compassion, kindness, and shared struggle. In the face of a government so cruelly intent on dividing us, those few hours reminded us that another world is possible.

On 14th June, the first Rwanda flight was grounded after last minute legal challenges and an intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. Activists who took direct action outside the Heathrow detention centres, delaying the vans and coaches from leaving, bought precious time for lawyers to bring their cases. Those who were eventually forced onto the plane were treated with appalling brutality. Surrounded by security escorts, they were handcuffed, restrained, and utterly terrified. In the end, the flight did not take off. But this torturous process, which inflicts trauma on those targeted and their loved ones, cannot be allowed to happen again.

When rumours emerged that a second flight was scheduled for July 20th, we organised a weekend of action against the Rwanda plan, which saw hundreds turn out at detention centres across the UK, from Colnbrook and Brook House in London to Dungavel House in Scotland and Larne House in Northern Ireland. Fortunately, the flight was postponed after Boris Johnson’s resignation and consequent disarray at the top of government. But the prior Prime Minister, Liz Truss, as well as Rishi Sunak, and their deeply authoritarian Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, have made clear their intention to continue, and even expand, this cruel policy, with plans reportedly being made for a new flight.

It is shamefully apparent that we cannot rely on a parliamentary opposition concerned above all with punching left and appealing to right-wing voters. The first High Court judicial review of the policy will take place in September, with a second case to be heard in October. But resistance is required now. If there is hope, it is in collective organising - on the streets, in our communities - and direct action against the infrastructure of border violence.

The government claims that it is pursuing a policy of deterrence to dissuade people from making dangerous journeys across the Channel on lorries and boats. People are displaced from their homes because of the legacies of colonialism, the impacts of illegal occupations and wars, and the devastations of climate change. It is policies like the Rwanda plan, and the international system of borders and walls that extends across Fortress Europe and into the Global South, which directly force people into taking dangerous routes to safety, leading to tragedies such as the Essex 39 and the drowning of 27 people in the Channel in November last year.

We are here because we refuse to be turned against each other on the basis of where we were born. We understand that immigration controls are designed to restrict the mobility of the global poor, not the rich. We see how fear, hatred and division are whipped up by the likes of Patel and Johnson to push through hardline policies that give more power to the coercive arm of the British state. They have the audacity to use the language of protection and humanitarianism, when we know that these policies will only serve to punish the most vulnerable, those who have lost so much and are seeking to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Those whose lives have been upended by the violence of capitalism and colonialism.

We are disgusted by the fact that the Rwanda deal specifically targets people seeking sanctuary from war, conflict, and other life-threatening situations, and recognise that this goes completely against the foundational principles of protecting those fleeing such situations. “No one would put their children in a boat, unless the sea is safer than the land”, Warsan Shire writes in her poem “Home”. We believe that no one should have to make such a choice.

We know that just and humane alternatives exist. We have seen how refugees from Ukraine have been met with compassion and granted visas - and we are grateful for this. We only ask that such compassion be extended to all, regardless of origin or background.

Fundamentally, we believe that detention and deportation, and other “hostile environment” policies against migrants, are inherently unjust practices, themselves a form of torture, rooted in a colonial legacy and based on an abdication of responsibility for historical and ongoing violence enabled and enacted by the British state.

We are acutely aware of the immense harm inflicted by these practices on those detained - made all the more deplorable knowing what many of them have gone through to arrive here, and that they are to be taken to a country they have never been to, separated from their families, loved ones, and lives in the process.

We believe nobody should be detained, imprisoned, deported, transported, or banished. We believe that everyone should be able to move and live freely, regardless of where they come from, and regardless of their involvement with the criminal justice system. We stand with everyone in detention who has been criminalised, everyone who has experienced first-hand how racist policing and the prison industrial complex join forces with the UK border regime to uphold violence of the state. We reject these systems in their entirety.

We dream together of a world without detention and deportation, without borders and prisons. And this world is already being built by movements and communities in the UK and across the world. We demand not only an end to the Rwanda plan, but an end to all detention and deportations.

Action Against Detention and Deportations

9th September 2022