Inside San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Centre

By Dr Diego Acosta Arcarazo, Senior Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).*

Otay Mesa Detention Centre, San Diego
Otay Mesa Detention Centre, San Diego

Although much of my research focuses on legal aspects of undocumented migration, I’d never visited a detention centre for irregular migrants. So when the opportunity arose in May this year to see inside the Otay Mesa detention facility near San Diego (where a Russian citizen had died just days before), I couldn’t pass it by.

The first thing that strikes the observer is how far the facility is located from downtown San Diego. Indeed, it’s very close to the Mexican border. Having finally arrived after more than an hour’s drive, and after going through a double electrified fence and registration, we are conducted into a room where we are given a presentation by CCA personnel. CCA — the Correction Corporation of America — is a private company making huge profits on running such centres ($227 million in 2015). With some notable exceptions, scholars have neglected the business aspects of the migration industry, perhaps due to the opaque nature of some of the arrangements between governments and companies working in the sector. Yet these aspects raise innumerable questions as to whether one can reconcile the profit-seeking interests of shareholders in such companies with human rights, as well as to what extent legislation might be influenced by powerful lobbies interested in perpetuating the detention cycle. (more…)

The National Preventive Mechanism of the United Kingdom

By John Wadham, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Implementation Centre (University of Bristol) and NPM Chair.*

john wadhamThe National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) describes the network of independent statutory bodies that have responsibility for preventing ill-treatment in detention.[1]  In every jurisdiction of the UK – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales the bodies in this network have the job of inspecting or monitoring every place of detention to try to prevent the ill-treatment of those detained. The inspection and monitoring bodies provide essential protections for anyone detained anywhere in the UK, many of whom are vulnerable.  Whether a person is compulsorily detained in a prison, an immigration detention centre, a psychiatric hospital, or as a child in a Secure Training Centre there is an organization designed to ensure that no ill-treated will be tolerated. (more…)