The Windrush scandal has dominated the news for the last two weeks. The story began with Caribbean Commonwealth migrants, resident in the UK for decades and entitled to British citizenship, who had been denied access to healthcare and the right to work, and who had been detained and threatened with deportation.
The discussion has since widened to bring the government’s whole approach to migration into question. The ‘hostile environment’ was the key tenet of Theresa May’s immigration policy as Home Secretary, and put into law through the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016. Our friends at Liberty have produced a timely report on how the hostile environment has turned teachers, doctors and landlords into de facto immigration enforcement officers.
Immigration detention forms a key part of the hostile environment and we see its impact in our work every day. People are detained indefinitely at the discretion of the Home Office, without the authorisation of a judge. The pervasive threat of detention hangs over migrant communities and deters people from engaging with the Home Office. More than half of the people detained are eventually released back into the community, their detention having served no purpose and their mental health often in tatters.
The Windrush affair has brought new pressure to the issue of detention reform. Former cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell visited Brook House IRC on Thursday. Mishka from the Freed Voices group sees the visit as an ‘important symbolic step‘ on the road to detention reform.
The government has blamed the scandal on Home Office administration, which supposedly “lost sight of the individual“, but has yet to take responsibility for the inevitable consequences of its callous hostility towards immigrants. The Home Secretary Amber Rudd has expressed her “bitter regret” that Windrush citizens have been treated so badly. But as Sally Daghlian from Praxis Community Projects charity has said, “If you create a hostile environment, you shouldn’t be surprised that it’s hostile.”
