The British government is separating children from parents who have been taken into immigration detention – the practice that brought worldwide condemnation for the Trump administration.
Scores of children – and possibly hundreds – are separated from a parent or carer in the UK every year, according to a charity that challenges immigration detention.
Bail for Immigration Detainees (Bid) has so far this year represented 155 parents who have been separated from a child or children while in immigration detention in the UK. The charity usually handles around 170 cases a year.
While current Home Office guidelines state that children should not be separated from a parent if that results in the child being taken into care, Bid says this has happened to three families in the last 16 months.
In two cases, fathers were taken into immigration detention after local authorities warned that their children’s mothers were unable to care for them alone, and that the children would need to spend their childhoods in care. Both men were eventually bailed.
In a study published in 2013, Bid studied a sample of 111 parents who had been separated from 200 children over a three-year period. The average period of detention had been 270 days.
Source: The Guardian
