‘I was spat on for being gay’: LGBTQ+ abuse in immigration detention

As soon as Joel Mordi was driven into the asylum detention compound, he described it as if the ‘gates of hell’ had just opened.

Wearing a blazer and Doc Martens with rainbow laces, he was guided through the big hall of Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) lined with yellow doors and gangs of people clustered together.

Joel immediately felt powerless, as homophobic insults from fellow detainees started.

‘People called me a sissy,’ the 26-year-old gay man tells Metro. ‘Then there was f****t and batty boy, but there were so many street terms that I didn’t know. The ones I couldn’t understand were probably really bad.

‘It felt like I had a target on my back,’ he adds, ‘but the officer I was with didn’t do anything.’

Joel was just 21 on November 5, 2019, when he touched down in London after leaving his home country of Nigeria – where homosexual acts are punishable by up to 14 years in prison. He fled Lagos after organising a public protest for LGBTQ+ rights and receiving death threats as a result.

But his ordeal wasn’t over. Claiming asylum at Heathrow Airport immediately after landing, he says he was held in a waiting room for 11 hours – where he was strip searched – and then transferred to Harmondsworth IRC.

Joel spent one night in the facility’s annex, then was transferred to the main detention area, where the homophobic insults from fellow detainees occurred. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning.

Joel adds: ‘One night, the door handle started rattling and someone I didn’t know opened it. He had come to gain sexual favours and threatened to hurt me if I didn’t comply. Eventually, I did what he wanted and then he left.

‘The following night, he came into my room again. This time, he wanted something different, but I couldn’t go through with it. He tried but I screamed and he left,’ he says.

Joel was left shaken and scared for his life, especially with how eerily silent it was in the aftermath when his world felt like it had completely crumbled.

At the time, he tried to report to one of the officers what had happened to him, but Joel says she ‘didn’t want to hear it’ and so ‘dismissed’ him. 

Five years on, Joel still recalls vivid and traumatising details of the assault, including the man smelling of weed or the countless cuts on both of his arms. Thankfully, to Joel’s relief, he was granted bail less than a week after his detainment. But the damage was already done.

In the years since, his mental health suffered immensely, including insomnia, nightmares, flashbacks and ‘major’ PTSD. ‘Detention never really leaves you,’ he says. ‘I remember everything. I’ve tried to undo it but there are some things that will be forever etched in me.’

Home Office figures published in August showed there was a large increase in decisions on asylum claims in 2023 (3,430, up from 1,050 in 2022), due in part to the Sunak Government’s pledge to clear the backlog of ‘legacy’ claims. But this seems to have had a knock-on effect with the amount of people detained – including LGBTQ+ people.

According to exclusive figures shared with Metro via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from immigration charity Rainbow Migration, there were at least 259 LGBTQ+ people held in immigration detention in 2023 – which is almost exactly double the amount (129) in 2022.

Rainbow Migration’s Carla Manso explains that the Home Office ‘does not systematically collect or publish any data on LGBTQ+ people in detention’, which is why they’re reliant on FOI data – but even that has its limits.

She tells Metro: ‘[It’s] missing eight months’ worth of numbers from Derwentside and nine months’ worth from Colnbrook and Harmondsworth – some of the biggest detention centres in the UK. That missing data, and the fact that what data there is relies on LGBTQ+ people voluntarily outing themselves to detention centre staff, is why we expect the true number to be significantly higher.’

In 2017, BBC Panorama went undercover in Brook House IRC near Gatwick Airport to reveal instances of general abuse and mistreatment, including staff verbally abusing detainees and inmates terrorising others in detention. After public backlash, an independent inquiry – known as the Brook House Inquiry – was announced in 2019, with the results published in September last year.

It detailed the treatment of an unnamed Moroccan gay man – referred to as D1538 – who was detained in the IRC from June 2017 and said he ‘did not feel safe in detention as a gay man’.

Kate Eves, Chair of the Brook House Inquiry, found that Detention Custody Officer (DCO) Darren Tomsett made a remark to D1538 that ‘he needed to change his clothes because he looked gay’, implying that ‘there was something wrong with the way that D1538 was dressed’.

The report found that ‘the comment was therefore probably made with the express intention of humiliating’ the Moroccan gay man and that the officer’s ‘specific choice of words could have placed’ him at ‘risk of harm’.

Kate Eves concluded: ‘As such, I find that there is credible evidence that D1538’s treatment during this incident alone is capable of amounting to degrading treatment.’ On top of that, ‘there were serious failings in how D1538’s complaints were investigated.’

Rishi Sunak’s Government responded to the report’s findings in March, stating that contracted service provider staff behaviour and culture was ‘shocking and unacceptable’.

The Home Office says it supplies diversity training to DCOs. It also has guidance for staff that provides consistent standards for the treatment of both LGB and transsexual individuals.

Unfortunately, this is just scratching the surface of what life is like for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in detention, according to several people who have spoken to Metro.

Nisha – a 44-year-old transgender woman, originally from India – came to the UK in 2007, after fearing how people might react to her coming out and transition. She had heard of staggering employment discrimination and even threats of violence against trans people, so she came to Great Britain to further her education.

While on a series of student visas, she felt safe enough to properly start to explore her transness, including accessing NHS gender identity clinics and hormone therapy. But in July 2014, she was arrested on suspicion of breaching the employment conditions attached to her visa.

This led to her detention at five separate IRCs across the UK over a period of less than a year. Shockingly, she was housed in male facilities – despite informing officers she was transgender and on hormones. She says she was denied her oestrogen, which caused her to experience intense gender dysphoria.

‘I had to detransition the whole way,’ she tells Metro from her accommodation in London. ‘All my facial hair got worse.’

She says negative comments from other detainees were ‘always’ there, adding: ‘They would come and talk to me about how I look. They’d ask me “why are your boobs so big?” and the teasing was always there. It was really horrible.’

In one facility, there were only communal showers, which she hated because it invited negative comments about her body – so she just stopped showering. ‘I was feeling dirty,’ Nisha adds. ‘As a trans person, you need some kind of privacy.’

She was finally released from detention in early 2015, but the trauma and anxiety she went through has stayed with her for years. This is especially so after multiple Home Office refusals on her asylum claim – eventually being approved in 2019.

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Nisha’s story is not an isolated incident. A report by Rainbow Migration published in February last year details further shocking examples of LGBTQ+ discrimination.

On person included in the report was Usman*, a gay man from West Africa, who fled to the UK after his partner was killed in a homophobic attack. He experienced repeated aggression by the man he was forced to share a bunk bed with and was called a ‘f*****g gay’ and ‘stupid gay man’, before things escalated.

‘He spat on my face for being gay,’ Usman told the charity. ‘I had to report him, but they couldn’t do anything tangible.’ Then his roommate attempted to physically attack him by throwing a heavy object, but missed – it was only at this point that Usman was separated.

Thankfully, Usman – who is now a British citizen – felt supported by staff at the time, who said to him, ‘You have to open up to us so that we know how to protect you’.

Unfortunately, this is not something Manono – originally from Malawi, where queer women can face up to five years in prison – felt like she could face.

‘I did not tell anyone I was a lesbian,’ she shares with Rainbow Migration. ‘I thought I was going to be sent home, so I knew that if I was open about my sexuality, it was going to be very hard for me when I went back to Malawi.’

She adds: ‘Being in detention made me feel like I’m not a human being. I felt like I was just a number. It has made me lose my confidence. It’s so hard not knowing how long you’ll be there… It’s worse than prison.’

According to the charity, the situation seems to be getting worse.

‘Our legal services have seen an increase since the start of this year in LGBTQ+ people contacting us from detention or having recently been detained,’ Carla Manso explains. ‘And that more of our service users are worried about the risk of detention (especially when reporting), so we are providing more support and advice around that.’

‘We have also had a lot more service users with refusal decisions over the past months and who have reporting appointments following this, and this tends to be when they are most anxious about the risk of detention. So we are worried that detention numbers for LGBTQ+ people will keep increasing,’ she adds.

To combat this, Micro Rainbow – a separate charity helping to provide safe housing – wants to see asylum detention for LGBTQ+ people abolished and replaced with a more ‘holistic and community-based approach’.

This means providing housing to LGBTQ+ people to live together in safety, fostering social inclusion, and forming friendships with like-minded people. One person they’ve helped support is Chege*, a Kenyan gay man who has been detained several times.

He contacted Micro Rainbow after reaching breaking point, Chege tells Metro.

‘It was incredibly traumatising,’ he explains. ‘I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I lost a lot of weight. It was a lonely and isolating place.’

The charity put Chege up in their house for people with No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) – meaning his immigration status meant he couldn’t access financial support – which gave him the stability he needed to prepare a new asylum claim.

While living there under his bail conditions, he could fulfil all the requirements of the Home Office, such as signing in every two weeks. He has also been able to build his case with his solicitor and work on regularising his status.

‘This helps to safeguard their mental and physical health and keep them safe from harassment and violence from other detainees,’ Micro Rainbow’s Communications Manager Rosalind Duignan-Pearson tells Metro.

Thankfully, since his detention, Joel has been supported by LGBTQ+ and immigration charities – AKT, Safe Passage, Micro Rainbow, and Rainbow Migration – who he says have been a ‘lifeline’.

But after his traumatic ordeal in detention, he has a message for the Home Office. ‘If detention is already a damned place for our counterparts, times it by at least 11 and that’s how it is for LGBTQ+ people,’ Joel says. ‘It’s not fit for purpose’.

Nisha agrees, saying, ‘Detention should not be there for LGBTQ+ people at all. Please help us. And treat us as humans.’

A Home Office spokesperson told Metro: ‘We take very seriously allegations of discrimination against individuals in our care and would be happy to look further if more information on these cases is provided.‘

* Names have been changed.

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