On Saturday 7th May, FRFI supporters from around Scotland joined the ‘Shut down Dungavel immigration prison’ protest called by ‘We will rise’ an activist group led by former immigration detainees in Glasgow. The event formed part of a transnational day of action against immigration detention and joined 20 protests at immigration prisons across Britain, France and Greece.
Dungavel holds 249 prisoners and is run on behalf of the Home Office by private US firm GEO Group, expanding their network of profit making prisons across the globe. Suicide attempts, protests and hunger strikes are common, with many detainees being held indefinitely in cramped conditions with little access to healthcare or legal advice. After a noise protest of drumming and banging on the towering perimeter fences, activists managed to make contact with immigration detainees who had assembled in the small exercise yard to join the demonstration. From a hill directly behind the prison we were able to make phone calls to detainees and broadcast their message to the rest of the protest ‘one message, one slogan, end all immigration detention’
The Revolutionary Communist Group demands the closure of all immigration prisons and stands in solidarity with all migrants. In an imperialist nation like Britain, which wages war and exploits oppressed peoples around the world, all forms of immigration control are, by their very nature, racist and imposed in the interests of capital, irrespective of whether they target refugees and asylum seekers, ‘economic migrants’, students or any other type of migrant. Nor can anyone who comes to Britain or any other wealthy nation from a country ravaged by imperialist plunder be dismissed as an ‘economic migrant’, rather than a ‘real refugee’. Imperialist oppression is both political and economic and fleeing it always has a political dimension. We campaign against all British immigration controls and opposes all detentions and deportations.
