What the scandal at Manston asylum centre says about our migration system

Today in Focus

The Guardian

News, Daily News

4.6 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

For the last six weeks conditions at a centre housing people who made perilous journeys across the Channel on small boats have been making the headlines. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, has pointed the finger at a ‘broken’ system. But why is the Home Office so often at the centre of a crisis?. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Guardian.
0:08.8	Today, chaos and confusion at the Mansden Processing Centre.
0:13.8	What's gone wrong with our asylum system?
0:24.5	Down, down, down, down!
0:27.2	This place should be closed down, it's in disgrace!
0:29.9	It's not fit for habitation!
0:33.5	At first, the news reports revealed dangerous outbreaks of highly infectious diseases.
0:40.0	And they're only meant to spend a day or two here,
0:42.0	but many have been here weeks,
0:43.8	and at least eight have reportedly caught diptheria, a highly contagious virus.
0:48.0	The Mansden Assignment Processing Centre was seeing MRSA diptheria and scabies spreading rapidly on the site.
0:57.2	Well, yesterday the new immigration minister Robert Jenrick visited the Mansden Immigration Centre.
1:02.1	He travelled there with Sir Roger Gail, Conservative MP for Tannit North.
1:05.9	What I saw yesterday, and indeed previously on Thursday, was a deterioration actually between Thursday and yesterday.
1:11.5	If he's overwhelmed and if he's wholly unacceptable.
1:14.5	It soon became clear that Mansden had descended into chaos.
1:19.6	It's rows of marquees designed to hold no more than 1600 people for a few hours at a time.
1:26.0	We're detaining more than 4,000 men, women and children for weeks in squatted conditions.
1:33.1	I discovered that I was frankly speechless and I'm not someone who is normally speechless.
1:38.3	Asylum seekers were referred to by numbers, not by their names.
1:42.7	Staff were disciplined for trying to sell drugs to them.
1:46.0	In the panic to fix the overcrowding, some migrants found themselves bust into central London and abandoned.
	...

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