Across the table from me inside the detention center at the Rome airport, a Palestinian man told me, “Every time I come here, my health gets worse.” He had lived in Italy for over thirty years. It was his seventh time being detained. 

Tucked away in the mountains of northern Greece, a guy from Pakistan looked at me and said, “I don’t know why I have been in here so long.” His fingers were clenching the high metal fence that confined him in what can only be described as an open-air prison camp. 

With his asylum claim rejected yet again, a man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo shared a thought about the six months he spent in two detention centers in Belgium. “Detention here was psychological torture,” he said.  “Now, I don’t go outside much.”

On a rooftop in Malta, I stood with a man from Sierra Leone.  A group of pigeons swooped overhead. He looked at the birds, closed his eyes and then he smiled. I could only imagine where his thoughts took him at that moment. “I felt like I would never get out of detention,” he had said to me earlier that day.  He had spent almost two years in detention.

And, in the Netherlands, a man from Myanmar (Burma) watched two of his children play together. From the outside, this apartment-like complex where he and other families seeking asylum had been placed didn’t look like a detention center. However, with all the rules, restrictions, monitoring and control imposed upon them, it was just another form of detention dressed up as being more humane. “I feel like it’s a prison,” he said. “Mentally you become sick day by day.”

In the European Union and the broader (46-member) Council of Europe there are numerous regulations, directives, treaties and laws that regulate member-states responsibilities toward migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, including with respect to the use of detention. While member states are bound to these policies, their implementation (or lack of implementation) can vary widely from country to country.

 Detention center. Removal center. Transit zone. Reception center. Closed center. Open center. Pre-Removal center. Police station. Border station. Prison. Hot spot. Tent village. Asylum seeker center. Family location. Across Europe, the use of immigration detention—in its various guises—has intensified and expanded since the 2015 migrant crisis. It has also grown in neighboring regions, often backed by European funding—and pressure—including in countries like Libya and Turkey, with the intention of preventing migrants and refugees from reaching Europe’s borders.

 The idea for the project Seven Doors began in Europe. The people I met were not fleeing from somewhere. Many had been settled in Europe for years, if not decades, often deprived of a nationality and stateless, hence lacking documentation and legal status. For them, life had become a traumatic cycle of detention and the fear of detention. Their stories were unlike any I had heard before.

 At the same time large numbers of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa were desperately turning to Europe for safety and a better life. Would these European nations expand their deliberate use of immigration detention to inflict yet another traumatic experience into their journey? The answer is: Yes. And now, years later, it continues to be, Yes. Those turning to Europe for protection have higher expectations. Additionally, the compassionate and dedicated individuals in this chapter who work to extend empathy and human dignity to people caught in systems designed to do everything to strip that humanity away, have higher expectations as well.

 Several things have become clear throughout the years of working on this project: When the use of immigration detention is prescribed and entrenched into policy, states push the boundaries of its use as far as they can; more times than not, states will use detention to harm people. When it comes to detention, Europe, despite its promise of a better, more just union and open boarders, turns out to be little different from other places.

“The first time to get to Europe, we had an unsuccessful journey. I was caught by the Turkish police. They kept me in detention for six months in Turkey.

“I was deported back to Afghanistan. After some time I decided to come back. I decided to take the risk. I couldn’t stay in Afghanistan. Greece was not my final destination, but I had no choice. It was stay here or return home. I was in a detention center for almost three months in the north of Greece, then I was transferred to another detention camp where I stayed for almost two months. There, it was very difficult.

“The most tiring thing is that every day you sleep in your bed, wake up, eat your food, and you have to go back to sleep in the same place and there was no space to do anything else. No sense of how long you would be there.

“Our faces were tiring to each other. It was not nice to see each other’s faces because for sixty days when you sleep and wake up, all you do is see the same tired person in front of you. For the first week it was ok, but after that, it was very heavy.”

“I was a very social person before all of this. Now, I feel like I should stay away from people. I’ve isolated myself. I do not interact with people. I think this is the gift I got from that detention center.”

32-yr-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan. Detained in Greece & Turkey for 11 months. 

“I’ve been in here for three months. They said they could keep me in here for 18 months! One month ago, they said they would call about my appeal but that never happened. Now winter is coming and we need warmer clothes for it. No one wants to leave their family but we had to. We left everything behind for our families.“

28-year-old asylum seeker from Pakistan. Detained for 3 months

“I left DRC because I worked for a human rights organization. At home, I was detained three times. The first time was for three months. I was tortured. I was detained three weeks the second time and again for four months.

“When I arrived here in Belgium, I immediately knew I could ask for asylum, so I did.  And then they immediately put me in detention. I never ever thought I would be put in a prison. It’s a prison. It’s not a detention center. I was in Caricole for two weeks and then in 127Bis for almost five months.

“I had no idea how long I would be in detention. The reason why I got out after 5 months was because a judge annulled the negative decision.  The judge said there was no reason for me to be incarcerated, that I should be free to work on my asylum claim out of detention. I asked myself, Why was I detained? I lost time!  It wasn’t right. It’s not normal. There are people I know who have been detained for nine months or even a year.  There’s no answer!

“In Congo, I thought about two guys who were in my cell. At night they were there. In the morning, they were gone and you never heard from them again. I can expect this in Congo.  Detention in Congo was physical torture.” 

“But what happens in Belgium, I did not expect. Detention here was psychological torture. To be treated like a criminal here in Europe…I didn’t expect it at all.”

42-yr-old asylum seeker from Democratic Republic of the Congo. Detained nearly 6 months

“I saw the life for me in Europe, and I saw I would be safe and have a life. I came to Belgium and was detained for nothing.

“I looked out and there were two police cars. I go with them and they say, Sign here! I signed because I hadn’t done anything wrong or had not caused any problems.  I didn’t have any problems in Belgium. I would work and go home. Work and go home. After 1-2 hours in the car, I didn’t understand where the police were taking me. Then we got to the detention center.

“They tried to deport me to Greece. They took me in a car with my hands cuffed and they took me to the airport. Six policemen took me to the flight. The captain came and talked to me, and I said, The police want to send me to Greece and I have no control and I can’t go!  If I go, I will kill myself! The captain told me to relax and then he went to the police and told them he wouldn’t take me. Then they took me back to the detention center.

“I was in detention for months. The months felt like years. Every month, felt like one year. After that time I was so tired. I stopped eating and drinking.”

“Back at home, there were bombings and fire and killings all the time. If someone gets in trouble, even there in that place, there is a judge and they can make a decision about you. And you know what will happen. Even in that place there is a system. You understand what happens.  Here, the months in detention you don’t know. You don’t have a decision. You don’t have anything. The people just play football with your life.”

37-yr-old asylum seeker from Palestine. Detained for 7 months

“There are a huge amount of emotions that go through me. I do the walk every week. I go from Brussels on a train, then to a small village center, and then into those fields and all that’s left are these concrete walls and chain link fences. I feel like I’m physically detaching myself from civilization in almost a literal sense.

“As soon as I press the doorbell at the front gate, I know from now on, it’s no longer in my head or it’s no longer my thoughts. Before, I have that calm. But as soon as I press that button, you have to expect the unexpected. You have to turn on all your senses and really pay as much attention as you can to everything, because it is all about these very small details in what people share with me.”

“I feel like I bring some humanity to the centers. I feel that’s the primary reason for me to be there. It’s the difference between not seeing them as part of a ‘file’ or as part of a ‘case’ like anyone from the government sees them. I try to challenge some of the cruelty inside that system in giving them back a name, giving them back a full story, rather than seeing them as people who don’t have documents. That gets connected to all these kinds of prejudices. What we do is come and listen without the prejudices.

“Sometimes I wish like I could just scream out all the injustices. But you are also realizing that maybe it wouldn’t make a difference.  Maybe once I start screaming out these stories, the world will just not listen or care. I think that is a very different realization. You can’t add more stories and expect a moral outrage about these things. The system will just continue because it is just so ingrained. 

“And that makes it difficult to realize that I’m not doing this to necessarily be the one that changes everything. I’m doing this because I feel it’s necessary that there is someone doing it, and I want to be that person.

“I find this an evil system but I don’t find Belgium an evil country. So, I wonder at what stage do you develop a system that becomes evil? What is the motivation behind upholding that system? What goal does it serve? Nobody knows about this and nobody seems to care.”

Ruben, Accredited Visitor

"I have not seen the sun for a month. They sent me back here again. I did eight months in the center. Then they let me out and I went to sleep under bridges. Then I went to the hospital because I got sick. When I was released from the hospital, they took me again and put me in detention."

“I used to live with an Italian woman. We were together for almost 15 years. Then she left me. How can I blame her? I was always here. They kept bringing me here. How could I give her enough to live? How do you think I’m feeling now? I always feel sick. Every time I come here, my health gets worse."

52-yr-old Palestinian man. Detained 7 times in Italy

“I just want to be there and that’s it. I just want to be there, that day, so they know there are people who think of them.

“The people in detention, they appeal for your feelings. But we can’t help them. And that costs a lot to us. We say, We can’t do anything about your situation, but we can be here now and talk with you at this moment. I’ve come just for you this hour. I’m a listening ear.

“I think people outside don’t understand at all.  It’s a great problem. People don’t want to see it to protect themselves.  Sometimes you become depressed because of the system in which we live. We don’t want to accept it, so we try to give something back to the people who need it.

“Some time ago something happened that shocked me very much.  I went to visit a man. I’ve visited him many times, and this time I had to wait and wait to visit him. I asked, Why doesn’t he come out? Why don’t you bring him down? And they said, He’s not in the building anymore. And I asked, Where is he now? And they always say, We are not allowed to say.

“I said, I want to know because I come and visit him many times. Where is he now? And then they used a word, We put him on transport. And that’s exactly the word they used in the Second World War to take the Jews to the concentration camps. We put him on transport. So they used the same words for a detainee. I became angry and I said, I never want to hear that word again! It shocked me.”

“Its overwhelming all the bad things. Sometimes it is too much, but sometimes there is this little light and you think, How is it possible in all of this? It’s important to notice this and that gives a little hope. Those small things. You have to try to notice those good moments. We have to celebrate those good moments, for you and especially for the person you are visiting.”

“Before the first time I went to visit someone in detention, I asked the pastor, What do I do? What do I have to say? And he said, Just be there. Don’t ask anything.”

“So I went, and on that first visit I met a big man from Cameroon. I said, I’m here. And we sat and we didn’t say anything to each other. To me, it seemed like ages, but it was maybe three, four, five minutes. And all of a sudden two big tears came to him and down his face. And then I said, It’s difficult, isn’t it? And he started talking. The silence was…I can’t describe.  It was just being there. Just being there. And I visited him for half a year.”

Visitation group, Asylumseekers Rotterdam

“Our purpose is to improve the detention conditions. We would like to see all of immigration detention disappear but unfortunately, there’s no prospect of that and it’s not very imaginable in this political climate to think this will happen any time soon. As long as detention exists, we want to improve the conditions, to try to make it as humane as possible.

 “The primary goal of our hotline is when people call, we are there to assist them. We want to hear from them about the conditions, about what is really happening, so we can learn from them and try to improve it. We listen to their stories so we can analyze what kind of signals we get from them and we bring that to politicians or the media so people outside are aware and so they can change the policies.

 “It’s really a closed setting and nobody knows what’s happening inside, so because of that, we want to hear their stories. It’s important for us to show our solidarity and let them know there is somebody monitoring things, watching with them and going with them on their journey.

“When we think of migration and also immigration detention, there is a political discourse which is very big, which is the asylum discourse and we talk a lot about refugees and asylum seekers. But there are people in detention who call our hotline who have been here in this country for a long time. Some up to 40 years. They are not on a journey to somewhere. They are already here and they have been here and already have lives here. They will say to you, I am not an alien! How can I be an alien if I have been here this long?

 “The days go up and down. In general, this kind of work is frustrating because you want to do a lot but in reality you make just baby steps or even steps backwards. Maybe I want to improve the detention conditions but the political climate today is to maybe make it worse.”

 “Some of the stories, they touch you of course because you bond with the people who call you and of course I am also human.  For me it’s always important to search for where I can still find some hope because without hope, I think you can’t do the work. You have to hope for it to improve or hope so you can at least monitor and try to make it not get worse.”

Revijara, Immigration Detention Hotline, Meldpunt Vreemdelingendetentie from Stichting LOS

“I came from a place where we had no freedom. Everything in our life was controlled by others. Here, I came for freedom, but we are controlled and controlled again. I’m a human being and I’m living in this country, in Holland. I’m not in Burma or Bangladesh. I’m in Holland. But, I can’t move forward and I can’t move backwards. Life is like totally stopped.

“People think, You are living for free. You have a house. You don’t have to work. You’re getting everything for free. But they don’t know the truth of how we are suffering in this situation. We are living everyday with so many rules. 

“People say, This is an ‘open camp’ because you can go outside and come back. But it’s not. We have to inform every day. We have to tell them when we go and we have to come back again the same day. We can’t stay overnight outside of this place.

“Everyday at 9:00am, the people here have to line up in front of the office to just report and get stamped. We report daily. Here I am. Here is my card.  I am here. I am not going anywhere. I’m here in this refugee camp.  I’m still here. I’m still alive. When I line up, I feel like it’s a prison. Mentally you become sick day by day.

“Every week we take one day and as a family we go out for 4-5 hours. Then we have to return. And we think, Let’s go home! And for a moment you think, Home Sweet Home. But then reality hits. This is not home. This is their home. They are allowing me to live here but with so many rules. People go home to their house to relax and take a rest. We come back and we feel more depressed and more stressed.”

“When I see people outside, they are moving freely. They are happy with their life. I want to be the same as that. I want to feel that happiness. They have no worries. They have no stress. They don’t have that depression like me. This is the reality.”