Inside the Notorious Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre
Inside the Notorious Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre
usan wrings her hands and twitches as she speaks, jerking her head from side to side. She is clearly not well. “I ate washing powder to try and kill myself,” says the nervous woman in her fifties. Her eyes flash wild. “It was all I could find. I wanted to die. I would rather die than go back.”
Susan, whose name has been changed, as have those of all the residents quoted in this article, at their own request, says she was a campaigner for human rights in her country of birth in South East Asia but that she fled after her mother was murdered by those she opposed. That trauma forced her to flee to England – not Britain’s superb welfare system or the lax immigration controls that prompted the mayor of the French town of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, to descibe the UK as an “El Dorado” for immigrants last week.
