U.K. interior minister quits over growing immigration scandal

LONDON — Britain’s interior minister resigned Sunday amid a scandal over authorities’ mistreatment of long-term U.K. residents wrongly caught up in a government drive to reduce illegal immigration.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said late Sunday that May had accepted the resignation of Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

The scandal has dominated headlines in Britain for days and has sparked intense criticism of the Conservative government’s tough immigration policies.

Rudd had been due to make a statement to Parliament on Monday over what has become known as the Windrush scandal.

The furor has grown since the Guardian newspaper reported that some people who came to the U.K. from the Caribbean in the decades after World War II had recently been refused medical care in Britain or threatened with deportation because they could not produce paperwork proving their right to reside in the country.

Those affected belong to t he “Windrush generation,” named for the ship Empire Windrush, which in 1948 brought hundreds of Caribbean immigrants to Britain, which was seeking workers to help it rebuild after World War II.

They and subsequent Ca- Rudd ribbean migrants came from British colonies or excolonies and had an automatic right to settle in the U.K. But some have been ensnared by tough new rules introduced since 2012 that are designed to make Britain a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants.

Legal migrants have been denied housing, jobs or medical treatment in Britain because of requirements that landlords, employers and doctors check people’s immigration status. Others have been told by the government that they are in Britain illegally and must leave.

In recent weeks Rudd and May have apologized to the Windrush generation, saying all pre-1973 Commonwealth immigrants who don’t already have British citizenship will get it, and those affected will get compensation.

Rudd’s position worsened after she told lawmak- ers last week that the government did not have targets for deporting people — only for a 2017 memo to emerge that mentioned specific targets for “enforced removals.”

Rudd said she didn’t see the memo, but The Guardian later published a leaked letter she wrote to the prime minister discussing an aim of increasing removals by 10 percent.

Rudd tweeted Friday that “I will work to ensure that our immigration policy is fair and humane.”