Did you know that Home Office data doesn’t include the reason that individuals have been taken to immigrant detention centres? Or that the UK is the only country in Europe with no limit on how long they can hold someone in such facilities?
One organisation keeping a careful eye on the situation is Spanish investigative journalism and fact-checking foundation Maldita, whose recent series of articles (in collaboration with Romanian organisation Funky Citizens) also reveals that the detention of Europeans is at its highest level since Brexit, with Romanian, Polish and Lithuanian citizens most represented.
Maldita’s project is replete with the stories of those detained in the UK; insights from organisations concerned with migration and data retrieved from Freedom of Information requests to UK authorities — new ones, and ones they discovered in the vast archive of public responses available on our FOI site WhatDoTheyKnow.
Reading the set of four pieces, it becomes clear that much of the data required to understand the wider picture is either not collected, or has only come into the open thanks to the public’s right to information.
Happily, when it comes to information from UK authorities, this right is available to those outside the country (despite a threat to this, back in 2020), giving a higher chance that data impossible to source from one end of the equation may be retrieved from the other.
Mentorship
We came to work with Maldita thanks to the Journalismfund mentoring programme, through which we offered support and guidance based on our experience around FOI and supporting cross-border investigations (see, for example, the Lost In Europe project). We were happy to provide expertise on navigating the UK’s FOI system, and making introductions to other organisations that would be of help.
The resulting articles present sobering facts about the quantity and length of detainments, as well as health issues and self harm among detainees. Until reading these, you may not be aware that the UK is the only country where no date has to be given for release — and, as one might imagine, this results in poor mental health among many.
Investigative journalist Coral García Dorado, Coordinator of Disinformation Investigations for Maldita, told us how our interventions had facilitated their project.
During the time we worked together, we introduced Maldita to our WhatDoTheyKnow platform and mentored them around the best way of writing FOI requests. “You can’t imagine how important this tool was for us”, says Coral. “It’s something we don’t have in Spain”*.
An invaluable archive
Perhaps Coral’s greatest discovery was around how useful a vast archive of existing requests can be. This helped in three ways:
→ They came across data that had already been requested, and used it in their pieces:
“It’s very valuable,” noted Coral, “because sometimes you would just be asking for the same information that others had — and if you put in the request yourself, you’d have to wait some time for them to send you the information. So if someone has already asked for it and the information is there, you don’t have to replicate the same job again.”
She gave two examples of where they used this approach: “We published incidents of self harm in detention centres. It was requested by one person, and we just picked it up from there.
“And also thanks to someone who requested it on your tool, we know what the longest amount of time is that someone has been held an immigration removal centre: 1,131 days“. You can see how both of these requests fed into the work in this article.
→ Where a request would have been useful, but was several years old, they replicated it
“We made a request to the NHS because we saw another person’s one. It’s very useful because maybe you don’t know that this information exists, so you don’t know that this information can be provided, and once you see that, you can use the precise same wording to ask them to send you the updated information.”
→ They discovered new ideas to explore
Coral explained that searching the archive using keywords around immigration “gives you an idea of what you can get”
Different countries, different access
Maldita encountered frustrations around getting information from the Spanish authorities — it turned out that getting it from the UK side was more fruitful.
“We asked [the Spanish authorities] for information about Spanish people detained in the UK, but in the end, we couldn’t get it – they gave us information about Spanish people in prison,” explained Coral.
“They didn’t have — or at least they said they didn’t have — information about the number of Spanish citizens detained in an immigration removal centre. But then if we go back to some articles published by all the newspapers, for example, El País in 2021, someone from the government said, ‘We know, at the moment of nine people who entered an immigration removal centre this year’.
“So they had this information, but they said they don’t record this kind of information! In the end, we struggled a lot getting information from the Spanish authorities.”
Other challenges
This kind of setback can be dispiriting, but it surely helps to share one’s woes with others who can precisely understand them. In the course of their investigations, Maldita spoke to a number of organisations.
One of these was the Oxford Immigration Observatory, who explained ongoing frustrations around the cohesiveness of data between centres — making it impossible to track detainees if they were moved from one place to another. In turn, this of course makes it more difficult to pin down precise numbers.
All worthwhile
Finally, we asked Coral how the investigation has been received. “It did have impact – I have to say most of all in the UK, from the different organisations helping migrants.”
She added, “It’s been great working with you, and having access to the tool. So thank you so much.”
We return the thanks — it is always a pleasure to facilitate a vital piece of investigative journalism.
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* In fact, Spain did once have its own functioning Alaveteli site, which closed in the face of challenges around the government’s reluctance to adhere to the spirit of their own Access to Information law.
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Image: Schumi4ever (CC by-sa/4.0)
