WE live in York among families who have fled persecution. Our children play with children who have been incarcerated in Yarl’s Wood high security immigration removal facility, Bedfordshire.

There’s two-year-old Ibrahim, whose mother was rushed into detention without him. He cried continually for the four days it took the Home Office to reunite them. He spent three weeks with his traumatised parents in Yarl’s Wood.

Anya, now 12, remembers her little sister’s second birthday in “the camp” – “The guards shouted at Mum so loudly, Mum and my sister cried the whole time.”

Some 2,000 children are detained each year. These families have committed no crime. They can’t abscond.

Where would they go? This life-wrecking process serves no purpose.

Extreme psychological harm is done to families who have already known terrible hardship.

Many parents have experienced torture in their home countries.

For them, arrest and detention here unearths past horrors.

We’re asking readers to join us in a national campaign to End Child Detention Now. Please sign our petition at petitions.number10.gov.uk/No ChildDetention/ And please write to your MPs, asking them to sign Sunderland South MP Chris Mullin’s motion urging the Government to stop child detention. Sample letters to MPs are on our website at ecdn.org Esme Madill, York.