updated: 28 November 2020 8pm
The Tories are planning a mass deportation of people to Jamaica on the day the lockdown in England ends on Wednesday 2 December.
On eo fthose faced with deportation is John, not his real name.
“My life would be in danger. If I go back there, I know what would happen to me,” he said, in a report from left-wing newspaper Socialist Worker.
After reporting to the Home Office’s Eaton House last week, he was sent into detention at the notorious Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre.
Speaking to Socialist Worker, John explained: “No visitors are allowed to come inside this place. My partner and my 12 year old daughter were sat outside for five and a half hours, waiting for the decision about me.
“When I was detained on that day, I couldn’t say anything to them.”
John says the family “did everything by the book”.
“My solicitor sent off the paperwork, with recorded delivery, to the Home Office a few weeks ago,” continued John.
“The Home Office said they’d tried to take £65 from my partner’s account and couldn’t, and that’s why my application was refused.
“But that’s not true, my partner went to the bank and no one tried to take no money out and there is money in there.”
Jamaican deportation flights being used to criminalise the victims
Zita Holbourne from anti-racist campaign group BARAC UK said: “Those targeted for deportation are branded by government as hardened criminals. But the reality is that some are criminalised by virtue of their immigration status and for others, they have committed lesser offences, [are the] victims of county lines, or have been convicted under the now defunct joint enterprise law.”
There are at least eight people that campaigners know about who the Tories want to deport next week.
The government refuses to allow detainees to receive visits at the detention centres, where violence and filth are common place according to accounts. The government makes it hard to get exact numbers on deportations and is willing to go to great expense to make its racist point.
Two brothers born in the UK – Darrell and Darren Roberts – whose campaign BLMM has been supporting, have also been threatened with deportation to Jamaica even though they have never been to the country.
The Home Office also wants to deport Osime Brown, a 21-year-old autistic man, to Jamaica, a country he left when he was 4 years old and where he has no family connections.
The threatened deportations come after the Equalities and Human Rights Commission said in a report on Windrush that the government broke the law by not doing an equality impact assessment when they introduce their racist “hostile environment policies”.
Between 2004 and 2015John had indefinite leave to remain in the country but was arrested on a minor drugs charge, and that’s when his troubles began.
The government is pushing ahead with deportations to send a signal to its racist supporters and wider society that it is migrants and Black people that should be blamed for the inequality and poverty that is crashing like a tsunami across the country.
It is no accident that the flights are restarting now, as the Tory racists seeks to divert attention from their own criminal Covid failures and the coming pay and benefit cuts they want to impose on ordinary people to pay for the mess they created.
Latest: TUI Airways may be the airline doing the deportation flight – more here
