THE HOME Office faces a legal challenge over its practice of keeping asylum-seekers in “segregation” at prison-like facilities.

Lawyers for refugee charity Care4Calais have sent a pre-action protocol letter to Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

They accuse her of failing to fulfil her legal obligations under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 by detaining asylum-seekers at sites such as the former RAF base at Wethersfield, Essex.

The Act states that the department must provide accommodation that “ensures a standard of living adequate for the health of the claimants and capable of ensuring their subsistence.”

Some 200 people have been kept at the remote Wethersfield site since July 12.

It is almost 12 miles from the nearest town, Braintree, ringed by security fences and monitored 24/7 by security guards and CCTV.

Roads around the site have no pavements and there is no public transport.

Many of those kept there come from countries such as Eritrea and Afghanistan.

Care4Calais chief executive Steve Smith said: “What we are witnessing at sites such as Wethersfield, and indeed the Bibby Stockholm, is a form of segregation.

“Whilst under previous governments, asylum-seekers would have been integrated into UK communities through dispersal accommodation, this current government has given up on any pretence of trying to integrate asylum-seekers into UK society by putting them in de facto prison camps and barges.

“Falsely imprisoning asylum-seekers behind barbed wire fences, placing them under 24/7 surveillance, restricting their liberty and separating them from any semblance of community is now the chosen policy of this government. We believe it is unlawful.

“We are putting the government on notice. Stop imprisoning asylum-seekers in camps and barges, close these sites of segregation and start tackling the real problems in the UK’s asylum system. If they don’t, we will see them in court.”

The Home Secretary is accused of “segregation by nationality” from the wider population, because “all or most of [the asylum-seekers] are non-British and many of [them] are also from ethnic minorities or non-white.”

The government is to respond to the letter by November 7, before proceedings for a full judicial review are initiated.

The Home Office said: “Accommodation offered to asylum-seekers, on a no-choice basis, meets our legal and contractual requirements and they are free to come and go.”