This case study considers Yarl’s Wood in three ways
1- As a site where the gendered dimensions of racialized violence that exemplifies the standard operating procedures of private military and security companies contracted by governments to enforce increasingly punitive and inhumane immigration policies.
2- As a space where, despite the daily reality of deprivation, physical and psychological violence, detainees forge support networks with others beyond the compound walls to mobilize against the UK government’s reliance on indefinite detention.
3- As a site where racialized death and violence at the external borders of “Fortress Europe” (Franklin, 2018) and those demarcating EU member-state jurisdictions, converge with public outcry over the UK government’s treatment of longstanding citizens from the West Indies. As a number of these members of the “Windrush Generation” find themselves detained in Yarl’s Wood, they become the latest generation of “unwanted populations” being targeting through processes of pervasive criminalization.