A Home Office deportation flight left for Jamaica overnight with just seven people on board, after last-minute legal challenges. The flight, which is understood to have taken off from Stansted Airport in Essex just before 01:30 BST on Wednesday, was originally meant to deport 50 people. Lawyers said it was "an enormous waste of taxpayers' money". The Home Office said all those on board were convicted criminals with no legal right to remain in the UK. And it added that late legal claims can reduce the value for money of these operations. Some 18 of the legal challenges were made in the 24 hours before departure.
Campaigners had been trying to stop the flight, with reports that some may have had a right to British citizenship. On average, a deportation flight costs around £200,000, so returning the handful of passengers to the Caribbean is likely to have cost the Home Office about £30,000 each. This is not the first time the Home Office has sought and failed to organise a mass deportation to Jamaica. In December, another aircraft intended to have 50 Jamaican nationals on board left with just 13. On that occasion, the Home Office acknowledged some of those due to fly may have been victims of modern slavery.

But with record numbers of migrants arriving in small boats on the Kent coast, and continued problems in organising deportation flights, there is obvious frustration in the department.Only seven people were deported to Jamaica on a Home Office charter plane early on Wednesday morning, at an estimated cost of £43,000 a person, despite 90 being earmarked originally for the flight.

While the majority of those due to fly were taken off the flight, the seven people who flew are believed to include three who were taken from prison. Of the four taken from immigration detention, one was aged 64 and another 66. One is thought to be suffering from mental confusion and is physically frail and had to be carried on to the plane. He is believed to have a Windrush case. Another recently lost a child in a case ruled by a coroner to be caused by medical negligence and he had to leave his partner, the mother of their child, to grieve alone. At least five of those expected to fly had trafficking indicators due to county lines grooming.

Read more: Diane Taylor, Guardian, https://is.gd/RA0hFB

Pretti Patel Must Cancel Mass Deportation Flight to Jamaica That Will ‘Tear People Away From Their Families’ on the 11th August

The government is being urged by MPs and campaigners to cancel a deportation flight to Jamaica scheduled for August 11, amid concerns its passengers could be children of windrush. A deal had previously been made between the Jamaican High Commission and the Home Office in 2020, not to deport anyone who had lived in the UK since before they were 12 years old.

Human rights group Liberty has described the deportation flights as cruel and which will ‘tear people away from their families’. A petition which has been set up urging people to take action against the Home Office’s ‘summer of racist mass deportations’ has gained over 180,000 signatures. It states: “The Home Office has planned a summer of mass deportations by charter flight to Zimbabwe, Vietnam, Jamaica, Pakistan, Ghana and Nigeria.

“They have already deported 14 people of a planned 150 to Zimbabwe on 21st of July.” It goes on to add that the Home Office is ‘planning more than one charter flight to Jamaica this year and are disproportionately targeting people from the Caribbean, in particular Jamaica, for deportations’, adding: “Most of these will be the descendants of the Windrush Generation who are still experiencing the devastating impacts of what became known as the Windrush Scandal with the vast majority of those impacting yet to receive any compensation.

“These mass deportations are racist and an abuse of human rights.”

Read more: Left Foot Forward, https://is.gd/EYjSkq

Put your MP to work, contact her/him, demand they contact Pretti Patel and request that she cancels the deportations to Jamaica

You can find your MP here: https://www.writetothem.com/

In Hydar (s 120 response; s 85 “new matter”: Birch) [2021] UKUT 176 (IAC), the Upper Tribunal has done an unwilling U-turn on the earlier case of Birch (precariousness and mistake; new matters) [2020] UKUT 86 (IAC). Raising “new matters” in an appeal requires the consent of the Home Office regardless of whether raised at the First-tier or Upper Tribunal.

Briefly, the background was that the Home Office sought to deport Mr Hydar following robbery convictions for which he was sentenced to six years. He appealed, relying upon Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in the context of his relationship with his British citizen daughter. That appeal was allowed, but the decision was reversed upon further appeal by the Home Office.

When the Upper Tribunal reheard the case, Mr Hydar for the first time raised an argument that he might have a derivative right of residence under the EEA Regulations 2016. This gave rise to a series of legal issues, summarised by the Upper Tribunal as follows:

Read more: Freemovement, https://is.gd/gDo3F7

More than 110 local councils and charities have vowed to boycott a controversial new Home Office policy to deport foreign rough sleepers. Rules that came into effect on 1 January made rough sleeping grounds to cancel or refuse a non-British national’s right to be in the UK. In April, the Home Office published guidance stating that the new powers can only be used if “a person has refused repeated offers of suitable support and engaged in persistent anti-social behaviour”. But campaigners said the policy could push already vulnerable people, including victims of modern slavery, further into the fringes of society, and that the limitations announced in April were “far from sufficient”. Now it has emerged that nine local authorities and 102 charities have vowed not to refer non-UK rough sleepers to the Home Office under the policy, by signing up to a campaign called Support don’t Deport.

It comes after The Independent revealed that homeless people have been threatened with eviction from emergency accommodation and given the option only to return to their home countries, even if they have UK immigration status. A spokesperson for the Mayor of London, who has signed up to the Support don’t Deport campaign, told The Independent: “We will not let those without a voice be quietly removed from our city and deported simply for finding themselves homeless.

Read more: May Bulman, Independent,

Support Don’t Deport: https://is.gd/1okk7U

Home Office Records 70 Racist Incidents by Far Right at Asylum Accommodation

The Home Office has recorded 70 racist incidents by far-right supporters against asylum seekers in barracks and hotel accommodation, according to a freedom of information response obtained by the Guardian. However, campaigners supporting asylum seekers in such accommodation say the figure is a significant underestimation of the true picture. The data, which covers 1 January 2020 until 13 July this year, involves incidents in the much-maligned Napier and Penally barracks – which have been under intense scrutiny by MPs after their untenable conditions were revealed, as well as a large-scale Covid outbreak in the former. Penally barracks in Pembrokeshire, Wales, was closed in March – despite only being opened in September 2020 – along with Napier, in Folkestone, Kent. Hotels have been used throughout the period but their use for asylum seekers increased sharply after the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020. In Napier barracks, four incidents were recorded between September and December 2020 – with 12 occurring so far this year. This is despite the barracks being temporarily emptied in April after the coronavirus outbreak. There are now thought to be 176 asylum seekers living there.

Read more: Diane Taylor, Guardian, https://is.gd/hHYptN

Passports Can be Issued to British Children Abroad Without Abusive Father’s Consent

In April 2021 the High Court held that Her Majesty’s Passport Office was wrong to insist on signed consent for child passports from an abusive father overseas. That judgment has now been robustly upheld by the Court of Appeal following a disastrous appeal by the Passport Office: Secretary of State for the Home Department v GA & Ors [2021] EWCA Civ 1131. I say “disastrous” because not only were each of the Passport Office’s grounds of appeal dismissed, but GA and her children were actually able to introduce a further point in their favour, with which the Court of Appeal agreed. So this appeal judgment simply strengthens the previous position.

It is not clear why the Passport Office decided to incur further public expense prolonging a losing legal battle in which success would have been measured in the denial of British passports to the children of a domestic abuse victim seeking to escape back to the UK. To ensure the facts remain at the forefront of everyone’s mind, the Court of Appeal helpfully reminds us that GA suffered, in her words, “months of extremely serious physical and psychological abuse including torture of me – much of this witnessed by the children – when he isolated us”.

Read more: Freemovement, https://is.gd/cMCmnk

Dependent Children to be Treated as Having Made Their Own Asylum Claim

In paragraph 121 of the Supreme Court’s decision in G v G [2021] UKSC 9, decided in March 2021, Lord Stephens held: a child named as a dependant on the parent’s asylum application and who has not made a separate request for international protection generally can and should be understood to be seeking such protection and therefore treated as an applicant.

The Home Office has decided that this finding makes necessary a change to its asylum operations. A note published on 30 July 2021 introduces the “Family Asylum Claim”. This is intended to reflect the fact that dependent children should, per the Supreme Court, be considered to have made an asylum claim in their own right.

In practice, under a Family Asylum Claim, the starting point is that the parent’s and child’s applications will be dealt with together. But there will be “additional steps to ensure any protection needs of the child are particularised”.

If caseworkers decide that the child does have “separate protection needs” to those of the parent, then their claim will be dealt with separately, under the policy on Processing children’s asylum claims. If the child has no protection needs at all, the policy on Dependants and former dependants kicks in.

Read more: Freemovement, https://is.gd/lw02Y1