“People are making decisions about my dad … the decisions they make mean I won’t have a dad with me. Please let my dad stay with me.” Neatly written but unmistakably the work of a child, this is the plea of a 10-year-old asking a judge to stop his father being deported to Jamaica. The letter is accompanied by two drawings: one marked “good”, showing him with his dad, happy and together in the same country, the other “bad”, where they’re separated and both in tears.
Despite this, his dad was put on a plane anyway. At around 1am on Wednesday morning he was sent more than 4,000 miles away. As the letter explains, it means his father will miss his birthday – instead of a day together, all they’ll have is a phone call.
This little boy’s dad was one of 13 people who were deported to Jamaica this week, all torn away from the life they know. This was not the government’s plan; it wanted it to be many more: 50 black residents of Britain in total. But its hopes were dashed at the last minute in the face of significant resistance.
Eighty-two black public figures – Naomi Campbell, Bernardine Evaristo and Thandie Newton among them – signed a letter opposing the charter flight, as did more than 60 politicians, many of whom are backbench Labour MPs, and a collection of QCs and NGOs. At the same time, 180,000 people signed a petition from BARAC UK and Bame Lawyers for Justice. Groups such as Detention Action and Manchester Immigration Detainee Support were supporting the people involved and several legal challenges were launched – some of them succeeding in the final hours, with a number of people being taken off the plane before the flight took off.
“It is disappointing that immigration law firms continued to use last-minute tactics to remove a significant number of offenders from this flight,” Tory MP Chris Philp complained. Such “last-minute tactics” included simply trying to provide people with the legal support that they should have already had access to, and stopping the deportation of someone who is believed to be a victim of trafficking.
This is a government that cares little for learning the lessons from the Windrush scandal, for “due process” or for addressing the racism its own policies produce. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I was sent out there. I would’ve been stuck in limbo,” one of the people who was successfully taken off the flight told the Independent, “I would’ve had to leave my family behind.”
They’re often hidden from sight, but the human impact of the government’s policies matter – they matter a lot. But the problem with this isn’t just that it affects the “wrong people”, those who’ve spent most of their lives here or those with children. To appeal to certain individuals’ “relative innocence” does “nothing to challenge the carceral logic that claims that the initial criminalisation, punishment and incarceration is legitimate when applied to the right people”, Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha have written, dissecting some of the limitations in how deportations are challenged.
“In fighting mass deportations, we cannot shore up the prison.” A narrative that consistently focuses on the idea that some people are “worthy” of staying in Britain implicitly positions these people against the “unworthy”, while often not clearly enough showing how the racism of criminal justice system can be connected to the racism in the UK’s immigration regime.
Arguments against current immigration policy don’t have to be made from the position of a supposed “good” or “deserving” side. This isn’t true only for deportation. It was, and is, possible to speak of the specific cruelty exacted on the Windrush generation without implicitly positioning them against a problem non-citizen or “illegal immigrant”; or to successfully campaign to end the immigration surcharge for health and care staff, but then loudly and persistently continue the fight to demand it is abolished altogether for everyone.
I don’t just dislike dividing up the “good” from the “bad” or the “contributor” from the “drain” because I’m obsessed with words. “Language acts as a supporting structure, stoking our basest of emotions – fear and hatred”, the writer Lola Okolosie argues: “These are sentiments translated into policy which institutionalises inhumanity.” These categories, then, help justify and produce regressive policy. And when they’re folded into resistance long-term, even if in altered forms, they can limit the wins - and the way we understand what’s possible. Certain groups continue to be deported, detained and made to pay the NHS surcharge, which just over a month ago increased from £400 a person each year to £624. There continues to be the concept of the useful, innocent migrant versus the threatening one.
Meanwhile, the Conservative government doesn’t caveat its cruelty or put many limits on its political imagination. In the middle of a pandemic, the deportations have not stopped: there are another three flights scheduled for next week alone. It has continued to put people in detention, even amid a current outbreak of coronavirus at Morton Hall. It has begun keeping people seeking asylum in squalid former military barracks. And the hostile environment is still shutting people out of basic but essential services. It keeps at it, setting the agenda and giving terms such as “criminal” and “illegal immigrant” the exact, racialised meaning it wants.
The lessons are there for the taking. As well as battling the immediate actions of the state and focusing on the more seemingly sympathetic narratives, there has to be a broader fight that is lengthier but can still feed into our current predicament. This is how to create another world altogether, where there is humanity for everyone, not just some.
• Maya Goodfellow is a writer and academic, and the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats
