Anti-Deportation Picket in Solihull

Like on every last Friday of the past few months, a picket was held yesterday at the immigration reporting centre in Solihull. The 'theme' for this month was "stop racist deportations!" Many of the 'usual faces' could not make it down (was it due to the Climate Change Camp, the newly occupied Cottage Social Centre or, perhaps, summer holidays?), so the turn-up was less than in previous month and the demo less lively. But the 'pitch' still looked crowded as bigger-than-normal numbers of asylum seekers had to sign on on that day due to the Bank Holiday on Monday.

Shortly after arrival at 12noon, 2 police officers, from the police station across the street, came over and asked us "how long the demo would go on for." The only answer they got was, "As long as it takes to stop deportations!" Later on, they paid us another 'visit', apparently after Snadford House had complained that someone had gone round the back and took photos of the 'snatch vans'.

Eye witnesses (i.e. asylum seekers who go there to sign on every week) told us of seeing people being arrested there and taken away when going to sign on. According to the Home Office figures, the number of persons who were removed or departed voluntarily from the UK in 2005 was 58,215, 37 percent of which were removed as a result of 'enforcement action'. That's more than double the number of new asylum applications for the same year (25,710, excluding dependants). Many of them, apparently, get nicked at these 'reporting centres' up and down the country.

Others told us of their hardship having to travel every week all the way down to 'Solihell' from wherever they live in the West Midlands, while being given only £30-something a week by NASS to live on. One asylum seeker had just been told by an immigration officer that he was not entitled to travel expenses (one-day bus ticket), while a neighbour of his, with almost identical circumstances (who was, funnily enough, signing on that same day), had been given one.

We also had an 'interesting' conversation with a man who works there for G4S, one of the private 'security' companies contracted by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to run reporting and detention centres. He argued that, although sometimes "cruel or out of control", it is "necessary to have such measures" (detention, deportation etc.) in order to "keep things under control and prevent others from abusing the system." Well, only last month the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, criticised G4S for "systematic deficits" in a report on detention centres.

Interestingly, he also informed us that some pictures of previous pickets had been published on Red Watch, a fascist website dedicated to profiling left-wing activists. So, watch out!

One of Birmingham NoBorders

Additions

Potos

27.08.2006 14:33

queue of asylum seekers waiting to get in to 'sign on'

G4S snatch van 1

G4S snatch van 2

some photos from the picket.

Feckin'_Images
Homepage: http://www.feckinimages.org.uk

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long story

26.08.2006 13:49

In nineteen eighty four, i lived in solihull; in the year two thousand, i was age twenty three, and living
happily with my girlfriend in crete, when inescabably in a babble of faces and voices this
time from solihull regurgitated itself into our lives; we split up, i began to drift; three years later alone, the repeat images ehoing around in and through my mind, i was picked up by deportation police near the border of bavaria; i refused to tell them my name and had destroyed my passport beause of something that went down under the shadow of glastonbury tor in 2002; The deportation police dragged me away to a secret privatised deport prison on ___23:05___2003... I awoke to find myself locked in a grey cell with a telescreen in the wall; down the detention block was a man from every country in the world each locked in a simillar cell with corperate media enforing neo liberal reality structures into their minds; reducing and adjusting theeir territorial imprints nullifying them: on the screen i began
witnessing the same control imprints that had been plaugueing me for three years allready and still do
to this day, images imprinted in the past of life in solihull i had moved away in nineteen ninty aged twelve to the devon coast ; Each detainee was subjected to behavioral control reimprinted;
the effects on my and their lives were devastating; Grey faces assualt my five senses every hour
of every day since i drifted away from my girlfriend and bummed out on the road in 2000: no one knows there is no way to tell people.
The privatized deport prison used treatments based on animal experiments third and first circuit brain funtions territorial and conceptual brain circuits in the clinical environment forced to make a decsision ;ùm m ind control can say no more:;::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

the local baker