'Surely that is not how my life was meant to be'

'Surely that is not how my life was meant to be'

“Detention is the worst thing you can do to a human being, especially one who’s trying to survive. It is cruel.”

That’s Stella Shyanguya speaking. One experience of cruelty is bad enough; it’s twice as bad when you are detained after your life has already been disrupted and you move to what you thought was a safe haven.

It’s triple cruelty if, like Stella Shyanguya, you are detained because of a Home Office mistake.

The France-born, Kenya-raised and legally naturalised British citizen was wrongfully imprisoned in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre.

If you are unclear about the difference between prison and detention, she will explain: “It feels the same - except that in prison you have a date for release.

“In a prison you are counting down the days, in a detention centre you are counting up.”

Personal restriction, discomfort, constant surveillance, lack of decision-making opportunity, the failure of the Centre to provide the special diet that was needed for her health: it’s all distressing, and as she describes it, the suffering replays in her mind.

But perhaps worst of all is not knowing when you will be released, how long the horror will continue: “Fear of not knowing what is going to happen. You can’t even answer that basic question.”

It started when, in a deliberately-used policy (“I don't know if it’s designed purposely to break you”), she was taken to the Centre at 2 o’clock in the morning: “Your mind is confused. You’re bewildered. You’re terrified.

“You feel somebody locking the door behind you: it’s a terrifying concept. You feel captured.”

After the capture, “You wake up every morning, waiting for a word.”

You are supposed to be given a monthly report that reveals whether you will continue to be detained or whether you will be released: “For four months I didn’t get that report.”

Your anxiety mounts. It starts to play with your mind.

The custody officers were intimidating, unsympathetic: “They’d make remarks like ‘Where are we deporting you to?”

In more than nine months of  detention, she says she attempted suicide four times and ended up in hospital.

“Hopeless” is the word she uses to describe what it is to be locked up. ”It’s daunting. There were times when I thought, Surely this is not how my life was meant to be.”

Other detainees tried to help, “telling me ‘It's not the end. One day we’ll be out of here’. But you can't imagine the ‘one day’. It’s a perpetual life of uncertainty. You can’t even plan for a week ahead, let alone a month or a year. All you can do is make a little plan for the next hour.

“It’s cruel.”

But this is Stella Shyanguya. Despite the hardships, the hopelessness, the cruelty of the system, she emerged as a fierce advocate, helping others fight their cases even while detained. Her story has been described as “a David-and-Goliath tale of survival, solidarity, and the human dignity at stake in the government’s new immigration strategy.”

 How did she do it?

First, “You adopt a thick skin. Then “I made the library my friend. I read every legal book on detention, immigration law and every book geared to education.”

She quickly earned the trust of the other detainees: “The sense of other ladies depending on me gave me  purpose. I aligned myself with helping people get out of detention.”

Organisations monitoring detention reckong she helped at least 60 women with their cases.

Finally, she herself  went to court and won her appeal. But even when the court ordered her release “they left me for another five days.and then I was given bail conditions. I couldn't leave my home. I lived in Huddersfield but had to report in Leeds; I was not offered any transport and had to rely on a friend.”

She lost a lot of friends, because as she says, “It’s hard for people to distinguish prison from detention. When people see youve been in prison, regardless of what for, you become a pariah.”

Detention left other marks, too.

“It still affects me day to day. I have missed so many milestones in my life [not only from detention but because of years of battling the Home Office]. I have got grandchildren I’ve not seen. She was unable to fly to Kenya for the funerals of a brother  and her mother. “I’m allowed to study and work but I have not been given any travel documents so haven’t been able to leave the country for 20 years.”

Last year the Home Office accepted she had been wrongly detained and compensated her, “but no amount of money can replace all the things you’ve missed in life. You cannot put a price on taking away a chunk of somebody’s life.

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In detention

• Immigration detention is the practice of locking foreign nationals in detention centres while their immigration status is being resolved. It is an administrative process, not a criminal justice procedure.
• The UK is the only country in Europe where there is no limit on how long people can be detained.
• Nearly 20,000 people entered immigration detention in the UK in the year ending September 2024.
• More than 50 people died in Home Office accommodation, including detention centres, in 2024, up from 11 in 2023.
• Immigration detention is a proven cause of significant mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
• Most people detained in immigration are, eventually, released, demonstrating the levels of unwarranted detentions taking place.

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Photo credit: Gordon James Brown, CC BY-SA 2.0, Stella Shyanguya