They came early one January morning. It was bitterly cold. The noise woke her: loud voices, fists pounding on the doors and windows. When Patricia opened the front door, four men and two women, all in uniform, pushed past her. They were in and out of every room, shouting at her to pack her things. Her seven-year-old son, Marin, was asleep upstairs. Within the hour, Patricia and Marin were in the back of a caged van heading for Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre near Bedford.
«My son was frightened, asking me what we had done wrong,» she recalls. «They wouldn’t stop on the journey, not even to let him use the toilet.»