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Yarl’s Wood: The fight to shut down UK’s nightmare detention centre

Yarl’s Wood: The fight to shut down UK’s nightmare detention centre

Culture, Explainers, News, Opinion, Politics, ReportingWeek1
“We are helpless, we are broken, please let us out! We want to go to our children” The screams from inside Yarl’s Wood detention centre are followed by silence, before shouts of “Shame! Shame on you Serco!” ring out in a deafening roar from 2,000 protesters. A fence separates the protesters from the 410 female inmates held inside the privately run immigration centre in Bedfordshire, one of 13 in the UK. As the drums and chants of “Shut down Yarl’s Wood” resume, a lonely strip of black cloth waves from inside the centre in solidarity: the only visible sign of life from the where women refugees and asylum seekers held there indefinitely. Set up in 2001, the Yarl’s Wood detention centre, run by Serco, describes itself as ‘a fully contained residential centre housing adult women and adult f