One year in Erskine

Nathan Hennebry discusses the Erskine hotel demonstrations of the past year and how deprived communities can fight for their living standards.

Overcrowding leads to chaos at Manston asylum seeker centre 

On Sunday, a terrorist detonated petrol bombs at a Kent Asylum Seeker Processing Centre, shortly afterwards taking his own life. The evacuation of this centre led approximately 700 asylum seekers to the now infamous Manston Processing Centre, following what had already been weeks of chaos involving overcrowding and reports of harrowing conditions even leading to the outbreak of disease.

ICE budget set to increase under Biden administration

The Biden presidential campaign received more money than the Trump campaign from companies in the border industry, with Biden promising these companies a ‘smart wall’ including surveillance towers with night vision and thermal energy cameras as opposed to the physical wall that Trump began constructing. This strategy of using surveillance follows the decades-long US border policy laid out in the 1994 border patrol manual of ‘prevention through deterrence’, forcing migrants into ‘more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement’. 

Home Office found guilty after inflicting years of pain

A man who came to Britain from Congo at the age of 13 in 2003 has got a rare win for immigrants in Britain. The High Court finally ruled in favour of Sam Louis’ claim following a decade of false imprisonment and legal hostility.

Protesters successfully stop Home Office raid in Glasgow

Hundreds of protesters in the Southside of Glasgow have today (13 May 2021) managed to stop a Home Office attempt to detain and deport two local residents to Afghanistan. At around 10am this morning, calls went out from local direct action groups, including the No Evictions Network, to physically resist the deportation attempt. One individual lodged himself underneath the Home Office van before other activists could arrive to stop the van from moving.

Sharp increase in modern slavery during the pandemic

Amid the pandemic, reports of sexual and criminal exploitation have severely increased, as stated in new figures calculating the extent of modern slavery and trafficking in the UK. Compared with the preceding year, cases of sexual exploitation, which includes people held captive in brothels and those strong-armed into prostitution, increased by a quarter in 2020. Almost a quarter of cases concerned children.