The Swedish Migration Agency knowingly maintains a culture of abuse in its detention centers.

By Maria Thornton 

Many migrants and asylum seekers dream of safety in Sweden but many find themselves trapped in nightmarish conditions instead. 

The Swedish Migration Agency, the government agency that handles all immigration related matters,  manages six migrant detention centers—but does its job poorly, with inadequate oversight and documented cases of abuse. In 2017, two of the biggest newspapers in Sweden, Göteborgs Posten and Sveriges Radio, investigated and exposed a culture of widespread corruption and human rights violations within the agency through interviewing detainees and employees in these detention centers. 

As a former asylum officer for the Swedish Migration Agency, I witnessed some of these incidents myself. 

In 2018, I was hired by the Swedish Migration Agency to serve as an officer at a detention center known as “Ljungbyhed.” It was a new detention facility, still under construction at the time. 

Ljungbyhed was completed ahead of schedule in early May 2019 just in time for its grand opening on May 20, 2019. A select group of staff were allowed to visit the center the week prior. They found malfunctioning doors which presented risks for staff lock-outs which could lead to potential hostage situations. I wrote down a list of concerns the staff had identified and brought them to management, who told me “not to worry.” 

But I did worry. 

With only a few days before the opening date, I contacted a union representative: Alex. The next day, Alex brought his team to Ljungbyhed. He brought a warrant to shut down the entire facility. The team showed up unannounced and management panicked. Alex explained the situation, that I had called with concerns, and that they had a legal obligation to conduct a security check on the facility. 

Alex and his team found that each concern on the list turned out to be accurate. They also discovered additional security issues, including a faulty fire escape plan. Alex eventually gave management a time frame of 72 hours to fix each complaint on the list, or the union would shut the facility’s doors permanently. Management had to delay the grand-opening by two weeks, as 72 hours was not enough time to address the problems. 

No accountability

Nadia Kariagianni is a former employee of the Swedish Migration Agency at Ljungybed. She talked to me about the corruption within the agency, how staff sought to provoke and punish detainees through solitary confinement. 

“You have to legally document your reason for placing a detainee in solitary confinement,” she said. “It has to be approved by an internal legal team. The majority of the documents were fabricated, either through blatant lies or by failing to mention that the detainees had intentionally been provoked by staff to the point of aggression.” 

Afghans as a group were targeted in the detention center. Employees would mock and imitate  “bacha bazi” (a form of child sex abuse through trafficking in Afghanistan involving dancing young boys, often controlled by powerful men such as warlords) around the detainees with the intention of provoking trauma. 

One Afghan man, Ali, was especially resented by the staff. One night, staff members walked into his room at 4 a.m. while he was sleeping. They poured cold water on him to shock him. When he woke up, he became aggressive from the abrupt awakening. Staff immediately then placed him in solitary confinement. Outside the cell, staff screamed profanities at him through the door, laughing and mocking him. Eventually they started chanting, encouraging Ali to kill himself. 

In 2020, the EU Prevention of Torture Committee were scheduled to visit the detention center to run a report on Swedish detention centers. Management informed staff that no one was allowed to speak to the committee without permission.

“There was a designated team, carefully picked out by management two weeks prior to the committee’s arrival,” Nadia said. “The rest of us were instructed to ‘clean up’ the facilities to ensure there were no traces.”

Abusing immigrant detainees

The staff would frequently alter the thermostats that regulated the temperature in the solitary cells. Nadia was instructed to erase the history of the thermostats to hide evidence of temperature decreases. 

“Staff would change the temperature to the lowest possible while forcing detainees to get naked, after they removed blankets, pillows and sheets,” she said. “The legal reasoning behind it was to ‘remove objects that could be used to commit suicide.’”

I was curious about the detainees’ personal experiences so I interviewed Ahmed, a detainee who was released in August of 2022. 

“Staff members make a lot of money off detainees, they sell drugs to them and over-price them”, he said. “The most common drugs were ketamine, cocaine, weed cookies, and ecstasy. Then they would use their sales to hold it over detainees heads, if you got on their nerves or were having a bad day they could plant something on you and send you off to a Swedish jail which is basically an undefined time in solitary confinement. It doesn’t matter that they were the ones distributing it, who are the cops going to believe – staff members or detainees awaiting deportation?”

Ahmed also recalled staff threatening to place him and other peers in solitary confinement if they didn’t give them money. 

“They would blatantly steal from us,” he said. “Sometimes they would come crying, asking for money to feed their kids, other times they would just threaten with solitary if we didn’t give it. It really depended on the officer.” 

Retaliation against whistleblowers

I faced serious consequences for doing my duty to report safety concerns. Since I was on a permanent contract (a Swedish contract that makes it impossible to fire an employee), management pursued intimidation tactics instead. They assigned extremely stressful tasks with no instructions, and screamed at me when I failed. They overworked me, often using abusive language. I was referred to as “stupid” daily. I had stomach aches every morning while going to work. After a while, I applied to an asylum officer role with the asylum department, in another city. The role was a contract position with a guaranteed extension after six months. 

Only two weeks into my new position, my manager called me into her office. She explained to me that my manager from the detention center had called her to speak to her about me. He had warned her that I was a troublemaker. She said she regretted hiring me and that had she known in advance, I would not have been selected for the position.

My new employer isolated me, failing to invite me to lunches or happy hour events, and my colleagues avoided me. Despite this treatment, I became the fastest producing officer in the department. On an average week, staff would finalize roughly 5-7 asylum related petitions per week. I averaged 12-15. 

Around Christmas, staff was informed that everyone received a year long extension. My manager called me into her office to let me know that I was the only one being let go, despite my production rate. She explained that she couldn’t extend my contract after hearing what my former manager said about me. She wanted a loyal team. She wouldn’t keep someone whom she suspected could turn on her at any second.

In June of 2017, over five years ago, Göteborgsposten interviewed a detainee who was using a prosthetic leg after he lost his leg by stepping on a landmine. He said that staff forced him to take off his leg in public and gave no reason as to why. The man reported that he would cry from humiliation and pain as staff laughed. Five years later Ahmed, Nadia and I tell our stories and we learn that nothing has changed in Sweden’s detention centers. Both Nadia and Ahmed have kept their stories to themselves up until now, mainly because they don’t believe their voices are enough to end the abusive conditions in one of the most powerful government agencies in Sweden.