Confusion at Home Office over wrongful removals
HOME OFFICE officials are searching their records to establish if any members of the socalled “Windrush generation” of Britons have been wrongly deported, a Minister has revealed.
Cabinet Office Minister David Lidington said yesterday that while he was not aware of any who had been removed from the country, staff were going through the files to establish whether anything had gone “appallingly wrong in that way”.
His comments came amid confusion this week after Immigration Minister Caroline Nokes appeared to suggest that some individuals may already have been deported in error. Home Secretary Amber Rudd later told MPs she was not aware of any specific cases. Mr Lidington told the BBC: “I talked to the Home Secretary about this last night and the position is that we have no information. We don’t know of any cases where someone has been deported from this category.”
He added that Home Office staff were searching records to see if anything had gone “appallingly wrong in that way”.
Following a tightening of the immigration rules, people who came to the UK in the decades following the Second World War – often as schoolchildren – have been threatened with removal unless they can prove they are entitled to stay.
Their plight has been highlighted by the presence in London of the leaders of 12 Caribbean countries attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
In hastily arranged talks in Downing Street, Mrs May yesterday echoed the apology made by Home Secretary Amber Rudd in the Commons on Monday for the way that they had been treated.
She said yesterday that the Government accepted those who arrived from the Caribbean before 1973 – when new rules came in – and who had been living in the UK without significant time away were entitled to remain, as were the “vast majority” who arrived subsequently.
“I want to dispel any impression that my Government is in some sense clamping down on Commonwealth citizens, particularly those from the Caribbean,” she said.
“I take this issue very seriously. The Home Secretary apologised in the House of Commons yesterday for any anxiety caused.
“And I want to apologise to you today. Because we are genuinely sorry for any anxiety that has been caused.
“I don’t want anybody to be in any doubt about their right to remain here in the United Kingdom.” A CHILD of the Windrush generation has told of his heartbreak at missing his daughter’s wedding due to an official failure to recognise him as British.
Joseph Bravo left Jamaica for London in the early 1960s and moved to Leeds before the end of the decade, playing in and managing football teams and working as an electrician. He was the son of parents who came to rebuild a shattered country following the Second World War.
But when the 62-year-old sent off for a passport to attend his daughter Charmaine’s wedding in Australia, the authorities told him he would have to apply for British citizenship at a cost of hundreds of pounds.
On April 4, the Chapel Allerton resident watched 32-year-old Charmaine approach the altar on live video, describing it as “fantastic”, but admitting not being there “cut me up”.
He went on: “She didn’t want to have the wedding, she was going to cancel the wedding. I said no, you can’t do that everybody has already paid and one thing and the other. But she was heartbroken also.”
For him it “just doesn’t make sense” as he came to the country in “1963 or 1964”.
When he was 17 his father got