Yarl’s Wood protesters get threatening letters

The immigration minister has defended the “punitive action” of handing women on hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre official letters warning them they could face accelerated deportation if they continue with their protest.Caroline Nokes confirmed that the threat of accelerated deportations was part of official Home Office policy after being challenged in the Commons by the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, who said the letters “sound like punitive deportations for women who have dared to go on hunger strike”.Abbott raised the hunger strike in an urgent question in the Commons after visiting the detention centre in Bedfordshire last month. She said her visit with the shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, had coincided with the protest over “inhumane conditions” in the centre.Abbott said the Home Office, Serco and G4S, who are all involved in running Yarl’s Wood, had “categorically” denied to her that there was a hunger strike under way. “It now seems that we were misled,” she said, before raising the threatened accelerated deportations.Nokes said she was first aware that detainees were refusing food and fluids at about the same time as Abbott’s visit and defended the decision to hand the protesters the letter threatening to accelerate their removal.“Of course I regard that as very serious. Nobody wants detainees to be at any risk, but it is important that they should not regard that as a route to prevent removal from this country,” she said.She told MPs the letters were handed to detainees only after an extensive welfare interview with medical professionals, which was used to explain the risks they were putting themselves under by refusing food and fluids.“We want nobody in detention to be in that situation and it is important that we explain to them the risks that are involved,” Nokes said.