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:
“All who wish to hand down to their children that happy republican system bequeathed to them by their revolutionary fathers, must now take their stand against this consolidating, corrupting money power, and put it down, or their children will become hewers of wood and drawers of water to this aristocratic ragocracy.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“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)
“Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,—and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.”
—Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)