This is unspeakably cruel.

Imagine this,

you came to this country as a child with your parents, this is the place you know, this is your home.

Unfortunately as a teen you got groomed into or caught up in dealing drugs.

(There are all sorts of reasons that young black people may be more likely to do so, they are complex and a symptom of wider society not any imaginary intrinsic criminality of black people.)

But anyway you serve your sentence of more than a year, (which you could easily have been given for a non violent crime by the way) you successfully reintegrate into society, you don’t reoffend and then

fucking years later,

in some cases after you have started a family and rebuilt your life,

you are rounded up and detained

(often waiting an excruciatingly long an undefined amount of time in detention) before you are put on a plane to a country you havent seen since you were a child and yet this government suggests is your home

and that, by implication, Britain is not your home

You would be precisely the kind of person who needed protecting and why legal challenges have rightly been launched.

The biggest reason you shouldn’t have been deported is that you are British.

for starters I know we have a ridiculous system as a consequence of ignoring recommendations made to the home office 20 years ago that deportations of “foreign national offenders” (which you are not if you cane here before the age of 13 says the leaked windrush review) would be processed while they serve their sentence in UK prison. Meaning that, on completion of your sentence you’d go straight from the prison to the plane.

In dismissing this they created a system which does great damage to people who have to wait an indeterminate amount of time between finishing the prison sentence and when the the deportation is ready to happen many are willing and desperate to get out but still have to wait. Many who have experienced both prison and detention say that the indefinite nature of immigration detention makes it worse than prison.

In prison you can count the days down, in detention you just keep racking up the days, terrified you will loose count.

I knew that there was an inhumane wait in detention but to let a person have a life outside, to build a family, but only for a while is just callous and cruel.

I HAVE QUESTIONS:

1. Why did you have that time in the community if they were going to be deported?

2. Was I wrong and actually this the system as it usually runs and this cruel chance to live and love here is given and then snatched away from all that are then subsequently detained and deported?

3. And if that’s not how things normally run why was it different this time?

I suppose what I’m getting at is was this normal or did the government go out of their way to crate this story? I’m asking were people rounded up to be props in a political stunt?

Fuck this government.

I don’t like the look of any of this.

& if all of that wasn’t bad enough they have done this to people who had the right to move on with their life after serving their time like any other Brit.

There were British people on that plane.

Had the government waited for the windrush review some of them would be at home with their families now.