Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Windrush campaigner dies ‘a broken woman’
Paulette twice faced deportation threat Dopey Don forgets 30 times memory failed
A WINDRUSH campaigner who battled deportation has died a month after delivering a petition to Downing Street about the scandal. Paulette Wilson passed away unexpectedly aged 64. Fellow campaigner Patrick Vernon said she died “a broken woman” after years of heartache over the outrage, which saw 80 victims wrongly deported by the Home Office.
Paulette, from Wolverhampton, came to the UK legally from Jamaica in the 1960s, when she was 10.
But, in 2016, Government officials said she was an immigration offender and must return to the country of her birth.
Paulette was arrested twice and held in an immigration detention centre before being told she could stay in the UK in 2017.
Mr Vernon was with Paulette when they delivered a petition to Downing Street in May. It had been signed by more than 130,000 people and called for swift compensation for Windrush victims.
He said: “It’s a complete shock. People underestimate the impact of the hostile environment which is based on fear and intimidation. She died a broken woman, that’s all I can say.”
And Labour MP David Lammy tweeted: “It breaks my heart that Paulette Wilson has died.
“She deserves our thanks because her fight was always on behalf of others, not just herself.”
Donald Trump has been banging on for two weeks about how he “aced” a cognitive test, claiming doctors were astonished when he completed a task that “nobody” performs successfully. On Wednesday he repeated the boast, declaring his memory to be “amazing”.
But clearly, he’s forgotten the 30 times he told investigators “I can’t recall” if his campaign team had conspired with Russia to get him elected – or that he promised to hand over his tax returns.