MORE than three-quarters of people detained during the pandemic were released back into the community with their detention having served no purpose, campaigners have claimed. 

Of the 12,967 people who entered the detention estate in the year up to March 2021, just 24 per cent were deported from Britain with the rest eventually released, according to analysis of official figures.

This is a significant drop from the previous year when the removal rate of detainees stood at 35 per cent. 

Campaigners say that the latest immigration statistics show that in an “overwhelming majority” of cases, detention serves “no purpose whatsoever.” 

Detainee support group Avid, which conducted the analysis, said that the figures call into question the Home Office’s “entire decision-making process.”

Avid director Ali McGinley said: “The rate of release reaching 76 per cent should be a major wake-up call, particularly when the mental health impacts of immigration detention are now so widely known.

“It is unacceptable to cut people off from their support networks for administrative convenience.”

Instead of throwing people into detention centres, Ms McGinley argued that it is more humane and less expensive to allow people to resolve their cases in the community. 
 
Bail for Immigration Detainees (BiD), another detainee support group, said that the latest figures “debunk the myth that immigration detention is only used when absolutely necessary to effect removal.

“Put simply, in the overwhelming majority of cases detention served no purpose whatsoever other than to cause pointless harm to individuals at the expense of the taxpayer,” the group’s research and policy director Rudy Schulkind said.  

In June 2020 the number of people held in detention centres dropped to 330 — the lowest level in a decade — following legal action over Covid-19 risks and the grounding of aeroplanes making removals less likely. 

But figures show these numbers have since crept back up, with 1,033 people detained at the end of March this year.

While this is still down 44 per cent since 2019, Avid questioned the Home Office’s justification to hold anyone in detention facilities during the pandemic “given the stated basis for detaining people is to remove them.”

The group said that this year’s figures show other worrying trends including a sharp rise in the number of people held under immigration powers in prisons – who now amount to more than half of all detainees. 

From March 2020 to March 2021 the number of prison immigration detainees shot up from 340 to 557 – an increase of 70 per cent. 

This is despite huge concerns over the welfare of those in prisons where Covid-19 restrictions have forced people to stay in their cells for 23 hours a day and limited visitation rights. 

Mr Schulkind said many of BiD’s clients have been detained in prisons in conditions that “frequently amount to ‘prolonged solitary confinement’ which is forbidden by the UN because it amounts to torture.”

“The Home Office is pushing these people to the limit of what a human being can be expected to endure,” he added.