Ijeoma Moore’s favourite TV programme is Dancing on Ice. Her favourite meal is fish and chips. The only language she speaks is English and she completed all her formal education in Britain. But, according to the Home Office, she is not British.
This was something Moore, now 24, realised two days after her 15th birthday – when she was taken to a deportation centre with her father and her younger brother, then 10.
Her father was visiting from Nigeria for her birthday. They were having breakfast and getting ready to make the 15-minute walk to school when there was a loud knock on the door. “My Dad was suspicious – nobody knocks at that time, right?” she recalls.
It was the UK Border Agency. Its officers put her in the back of a car and Moore sat still, terrified one of her schoolmates would see her.
“It was heartbreaking. I hadn’t done anything wrong and yet I was being treated like a criminal – my Dad in handcuffs, me and my brother holding back tears,” she said.
What ensued was weeks or months – Moore is unsure – in a detention centre. She could not speak to her mother or use her laptop or phone. After being released, she was put in foster care. It took her years to reconnect with her mother, who was terrified that she would get her children deported if they reunited.
That was in 2010. Moore’s family had overstayed their visas and needed to apply for limited leave to remain. They had a strong connection to the UK – Moore had lived in the UK since she was two and her mother had worked the whole time they had been there, so they thought the process would be easy.
Instead, Moore’s mother spent years saving for lawyers and application fees. She sold jewellery and borrowed from family friends. Once they had the cash, there were setbacks. But, after a few bad lawyers and several failed applications, Moore was finally granted status in 2015.
In the past few years, the fees charged to people with leave to remain have shot up – from £601 in 2014 to £2,033 in 2019.
The time that must pass before people can apply for citizenship after receiving status has also risen – from six years to 10 – meaning that Moore’s family would need to save tens of thousands more.
The £2,033 charge has to be paid every 30 months by every member in Moore’s family, but they have no idea if it will increase again or by how much. It puts Moore constantly on edge. “They keep moving the goalposts. It means I can never relax – I need to save just in case.”
If her family were to miss a payment, they would have to start the 10-year-route all over again.
In some ways, Moore considers herself lucky: in 2015, the supreme court granted those with limited leave to remain the right to study in the UK with full access to home fees – exempting students like her from international charges of up to £26,000.
But students must have lived here for half of their lives and have been granted leave to remain more than once to be eligible. Moore did not initially meet these requirements, and so had to wait. She watched, depressed, as her contemporaries opened their results and headed off to university.
“It was a blow to the guts,” she says, remembering the sadness of seeing her best friend move on without her.
“You grow up believing that you are entitled to go to university if you work hard enough. I was a brilliant student.”
Instead, Moore spent a few years volunteering with Let Us Learn and working for children’s charity Coram while she saved towards her second set of fees, which she has just paid.
Those fees included a £1,000 NHS surcharge. The charge was initially touted as a tax on visiting migrants – but Moore points out it is something she already pays for in her taxes.
“I feel like they view us a source of income. It makes me feel worthless, like I’m not human,” she said.
This year, Moore found out that she would finally be heading to university. But the weight of the next set of fees hangs over her. “It feels never-ending. I’m still going through it – by the time I graduate I’ll be 30.”
She will have to work full-time alongside her second year exams. The uncertainty and the trauma of being detained, she says, has left her with mental health problems.
“There is no flexibility for something to go wrong in my life,” she said. “I need therapy. There is so much I’ve been through and it’s still unresolved. Even now, I’m thinking, how is this going to turn out for me? Sometimes I just can’t cope.”
Asked what she would say to the Home Office if she had the chance, Moore said: “If you cut me open, I’d bleed the British flag. Being British is so much more than a piece of paper. I want them to realise that we are young people and we have grown up here. There is nowhere else that we could call home.”
