Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre is an immigration detention centre at Milton Ernest in the Borough of Bedford in Bedfordshire. It opened on 19 November 2001 and was built to hold up to 900 people making it the largest immigration detention centre in Europe at the time. Since opening in 2001 has been dogged by controversy. In February 2002, it was gutted through a fire, reopening in September 2003. Throughout its operational period a number of hunger strikes and riots have occurred there. On 11 January 2011, the High Court ruled that the continued detention of the children of failed asylum seekers at Yarl's Wood is unlawful.
It is operated by the Serco Group.
Read more about Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre: Inquiries Into Provision At Yarl's Wood
Famous quotes containing the words wood, immigration, removal and/or centre:
“For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 23:31.
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those, whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. Such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms their only available means for proving and preserving their authority would vanish also.”
—Baruch (Benedict)
“Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)