Our direct work with children and families in detention

In addition to the campaigning work of OutCry!, both Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) and The Children’s Society directly support children and families affected by detention. Read more about our direct work…

What work are we doing with children and families?
Which groups of children will we be working with?
How will our direct support work contribute to the OutCry! campaign?
What can you do?

What work are we doing with children and families?

We work directly with children and families affected by detention in two ways: providing legal support to children and their families to get out of detention and welfare support to help families affected by detention. Services provided by BID and The Children’s Society are free of charge.

Legal support

At BID a dedicated OutCry! Legal team works with families to prepare applications for temporary admission and bail. BID works with barristers who offer their services free of charge to represent the family cases we prepare at bail hearings in front of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal.

BID also runs workshops for families at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre to increase families’ awareness of their rights and to inform them about how to apply for bail.

BID intends to challenge the government’s detention policy by taking strategic cases to the higher courts. BID’s OutCry! team are working with legal firms to develop judicial reviews challenging the lawfulness of detaining children and their families for immigration purposes. This is particularly important in the light of the government’s decision in 2008 to remove its ‘immigration reservation’ to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Welfare support

From its office in Bedford, close to Yarl’s Wood, The Children’s Society provides support, advice and information to detained families on welfare related issues such as accessing legal support, engaging with social services on safeguarding and welfare issues, health, education and maintaining links with support networks. This work is done while advocating for the speedy end to a family’s detention.

The team in Bedford also provides a post detention service for families on their release. Advice is available to help them gain support with accommodation and subsistence, health and counselling, legal representation, social services, education and services to help address destitution arising from having been detained.

To put pressure on the government’s detention policies, The Children’s Society documents failures in welfare provision in detention and collects evidence of the impact of detention on families. The aim is to highlight the incompatibility of an agenda to safeguard and promote the welfare of children within a system which detains children for the purposes of immigration control.

Which groups of children will we be working with?

The majority of our legal and welfare support services are provided to families who are detained together, especially those detained at Yarl’s Wood. However we plan to develop our work with:

parents who are separated from their children by immigration detention (so-called ‘split families’ where a parent is detained and the children continue to live in the community in the care of other family members or social services)
age-disputed children in detention who are seeking asylum in the UK on their own and have been wrongly identified by the government as adults.

How will our direct support work contribute to the OutCry! campaign?

As well as providing much needed support to families and children, our direct work is vital because it feeds into our campaign to bring the immigration detention of children and their families to an end. Evidence from our legal and welfare support work is being systematically collected to provide a detailed picture of children’s experiences in detention. This will be used by our campaign team to push the government to stop detaining children and families.

What can you do?

Individuals and organisations supporting children and families in detention

Do you know a family or separated child who has been detained at an Immigration Removal Centre and would benefit from our services?

If they require legal representation to make a bail application then please contact BID
If they require welfare support in detention or on release from detention then please contact The Children’s Society’s Bedford Office
If you have experiences of the use of immigration detention for children to share with the campaign, please fill out the OutCry! information form so we can add your information to the evidence we are collecting.

Legal professionals

Are you interested in receiving referrals from BID to take on outstanding matters in a family’s immigration or asylum claim? Would you like to work with BID on strategic judicial reviews? Do you want to feed into the OutCry! campaign by sharing your experiences of working with children and families in detention?