BBC News has been given access to a secret training location, where hundreds of staff are being taught how to deal with people who refuse to go.

…

To make it happen the government has rented a secret training facility for a year, at a cost of £6.4m, for training extra Home Office immigration enforcement staff and private contractors

BBC News has been given exclusive access on condition of not identifying the location, to minimise risks to staff.

Inside, are three airliner fuselages, missing their wings and tails, with differing layouts to enable officers to practise getting detainees safely into their seats.

Some 800 staff, both existing and new recruits, who have already had five weeks’ basic training, will be given seven days’ specialist instruction in immigration removals in vehicles and on aircraft.

…

Officers train for handling those who will not comply on crash mats in rows of tents they call “dojos”.

We were not allowed to watch more physical training and the use of cuffs, waist and leg restraints.

…

“It can be quite challenging,” one of the trainers, Mark Preston says, but the “force used is always reasonable”.

But the use of force in the immigration system has sometimes not been reasonable.

In 2010, Jimmy Mubenga died while being sent back to Angola.

A coroner concluded he had been unlawfully killed, though his escorts were later cleared of manslaughter.

Six years later, BBC One’s Panorama programme secretly filmed a near-naked detainee being dragged screaming through the Brook House Immigration Removal Centre before being taken to an airport.

A public inquiry called following the documentary highlighted 10 examples of inappropriate and potentially dangerous use of force by detention officers at Brook House, near Gatwick.