Last year in the UK, 42 children were held in indefinite immigration detention (Picture: Getty)

Screaming children being torn from their mothers and locked in cages – this is what Trump’s brutal immigration policy has given the world, and it’s sickening to the core.

Just when we thought he had reached the bottom of the barrel, as if to turn the whole thing into a sick joke, children as young as three are now being hauled in front of judges to face deportation proceedings, having to represent themselves without a lawyer.

It’s a very grim situation.

These policies are not happening in isolation, they influence and mutually reinforce each other, as we can see with anti-immigrant policies across Europe, such as in Italy and Hungary, as well as the UK.




Although the UK does not expect children to represent themselves in legal cases, we do expect adults, who equally have no knowledge of the legal system, to do so.

Because of her sexuality, Nina (not her real name) fled to the UK from Uganda in 2012, when she was 23, having escaped imprisonment and beatings by her own family.

After a lengthy legal battle, she was able to remain in the safety of the UK because we at Asylum Aid represented her.

Whatever your age, engaging in a legal process without a lawyer is difficult and painful. Nina was told she didn’t ‘look like a lesbian’, asked intimate questions about her sex life, and made to describe details of her rape.

If Asylum Aid hadn’t helped her, she would have had to face this alone.

Our own immigration system is tearing families apart. Trump’s policy is sickening, and aiming for the title of ‘not quite as bad as Donald Trump’ is a very low bar to set ourselves. We are better than this and it’s time we started acting like it.

Every child should have a family that’s there to support them. Today, 15,000 children are being forced to grow up without a parent, because the right of their British parent to be reunited with a foreign spouse is restricted by unrealistic income threshold requirements.

A person who does not earn more than £18,600 — which in 2015 was 40% of the UK’s workforce — cannot bring their spouse to live with them in the UK, even if they have a child together.

Add to that countless Home Office errors in processing applications and the absence of legal aid to enable families to challenge these errors, and what we end up with is children without complete families.

Far from being in the best interest of the child, our system expects them to face a life without their parent(s) – leaving them more likely to experience depression, an eating disorder, and fall behind in school.

In Britain, we believe that people should be treated fairly and that no person should ever be denied their freedom arbitrarily. But every year, Britain detains around 30,000 people indefinitely, while a decision is made on their immigration status.



People are held in prison-like detention centres and in regular prisons among criminal offenders, yet it’s worse than prison – detainees are never told when they will be free.

For some it will take a month, for others many years. The UK is the only country in Europe that doesn’t have a time limit on immigration detention.

Last year, 42 children were held in indefinite immigration detention in spite of a government pledge to stop detaining children.

Pregnant mothers and people who have suffered torture and severe trauma have also been locked up in this way.

In the past year, more than 170 children have seen their parents sent to immigration detention centres, with some going into care.

Again, they have no idea when they will see their mother or father again. The toll of this on detainees and their families is immense – in 2017, six people died in immigration detention.

Citizenship is the key here. It’s what enables us to live prosperous lives. It allows us to see a doctor free of charge, get an education and a job. But countless British children are prevented from exercising their rightful citizenship.

Under British law, a child born here to non-British citizens and living here for the first ten years of his or her life is fully entitled to British citizenship, but is expected to register that fact at a cost of £1,012 which is far more than most 10-year-olds, and their families, can afford.

Without registering, accessing healthcare can be complicated, and getting a job or a place in university can seem impossible, because they can’t afford the piece of paper showing that they are, in fact, British.


The cost of processing a registration, according to the Home Office, is only £375. This means the government is using its predicament, and keeping British children in this limbo, to make a profit of nearly £700 per child.

What’s striking about this is that through its immigration policy, the British government is ruining the lives of its own citizens.

There are some rather simple ways the UK government can prove it is different to Mr Trump’s America – let families live together, introduce a time limit in immigration detention and stop profiteering from children registering their legal right to British citizenship.

That’s not going to solve all of our problems, but these are three simple changes that can be made now to make sure that our immigration system lives up to our values, which couldn’t contrast more with Donald Trump’s.

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