Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre is located in Harmondsworth, London Borough of Hillingdon. Colnbrook, adjacent to Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre and London Heathrow Airport, houses males and females. Colnbrook, which opened in August 2004, is built to Class B prison standards, making it the highest security immigration removal centre in the United Kingdom. Colnbrook had 308 bed spaces.
The building was officially opened by Des Browne, who was then Immigration Minister, in September 2004.
The design of the centre is modelled on a high security, Category B criminal prison with wings running into a central area. Each cell is designed to hold two detainees. There is a toilet built into the cell.
The centre is operated by Serco who also operate the Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire.
Colnbrook detains people who are due for deportation from the UK due to immigration infringements, however this may include foreign-national prisoners who have completed their sentences in UK prisons and who are detained pending removal from the country.
The centre offers detainees a range of activities whilst they are waiting for deportation including a library, multi-faith worship facilities, education provision, gym and sports activities, and a shop.
Famous quotes containing the words immigration, removal and/or centre:
“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)
“If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Freedom to think our own thoughts, freedom to utter them, freedom to live out the promptings of our inner life ultimated in this convention, was termed a monstrosity of the 19th century. What was it?—the legitimate out-birth of the eternal law of progress. This reformation underlies every other; it is the only healthful centre around which hope of humanity can revolve.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)