The sick, twisted immigration system in the UK sends vulnerable people back into the hell of war. People wait in detention anxiously, not knowing when they will be deported. Often it is in the night. They are woken at 2.00am and told to get ready for an early morning flight. People in detention go to sleep with one person in the bed next to them and wake up with that bed empty. Will they be next? The stress of being held against their will and not being able to do much about their situation causes health problems to develop, skin eruptions, depression.

To encourage complicity in the general population (that's us), the mainstream media print and broadcast a barrage of anti-refugee rhetoric. Even the alternative media is mostly silent and impotent in communicating exactly what is happening to refugees in this country. Occasionally there is a tv programme about the injustice and racism of the immigration machine but is that just to pacify our consciences into thinking that 'something is being done' so we don't have to act?

Whilst the government draws up tighter anti-terrorist laws to protect this island and brainwashes us all to feel as though we are under imminent threat, they send young men who have escaped being abducted, conscripted or forced by starvation to fight in wars, back to the places they escaped from. The violence in countries like Burundi, Sudan and Zimbabwe is abundantly documented so why send anyone back there? What secret deals are being done between the superpowers to seal the fate of ordinary people in this way?

We have the power to change this system now. What is stopping us from organising more effectively? Is it the fact that once people are deported we won't have to look them in the eye again?