My paper on why the UK reduced its use of immigration detention by 60%, even before Covid, when across the world governments are detaining more migrants http://detentionforum.org.uk/2020/09/02/how-the-uk-turned-away-from-immigration-detention/

Spoiler alert: it’s largely because campaigners, ngos, faith groups, individuals, institutions & (crucially) migrants with experience of detention worked together over years to change the politics. (In my view, & to the extent that political change ever has a single cause)

In particular the collaborative strategizing @detentionforum – but also many other spaces around the country

Now that detention is a political problem for the government, it’s worth looking back on how we got to here, from the days when the Home Office locked up 4000 migrants every night, and claimed it needed another 1000 places.

We need to be thinking hard about how this happened, because now is the best ever opportunity to get ever closer to abolition, or at least the small number of detention spaces near airports that we started with in the ‘90s.

The pandemic has meant that many more people have been released – will detention centres fill up again in the new normal? #MortonHall is closing and #YarlsWood is no longer used to detain migrants, but too many people have been kept in detention throughout the pandemic.