Former Trader Kweku Adoboli: Immigration Centres "Deeply Humiliating"

20 October 2018, 18:50 | Updated: 20 October 2018, 18:52

A former trader who was released from an immigration detention centre says the Home Office keep people in detention in the hope they give up fighting the process and accept deportation.

Kweku Adoboli has been speaking to Maajid Nawaz from his detention centre for the last few weeks, but the pair were able to meet in person after Kweku was released on bail.

The former trader, who served three and a half years in prison for fraud, was then put through the deportation process by the Home Office's 'hostile environment' policy where he was held in a detention centre for 36 days.

But on the terms of his bail for release, Kweku must spend every night at home in Edinburgh.

Kweku told Maajid that the month he spent in detention "did more damage" to his mental health than the three-and-a-half years he served in prison.

"We use detention centres to put pressure on people to make their lives hostile, to make it unbearable so that they choose to leave," he said.

"And that was my experience in the detention centre.

"The Home Office has the powers to release anyone that's in detention. There is supposedly a presumption to release, and that's based on the risk of non-compliance.

"But in order to facilitate their goal of deporting people, they manipulate that process to keep people in detention.

"The very person who you're appealing to to give you the power to remain is the very person who's crushing your humanity in order to take that power away."

Watch his interview with Maajid Nawaz in full in the video above.