Deportations: ‘UK Home Office Playing With People’s Lives’

By embarking on deportation of asylum seekers to the United Kingdom, the UK Home Office is playing games with people’s lives.

So states the Migrants’ Rights Network, an organisation committed to the course of migrants quoting  one of the detainees.

Its reaction follows the forcible removal of 44 Nigerians and Ghanaians from the UK on Friday,

Fizza Qureshi, the chief executive of the Network, while condemning the deportations, cited a detainee who had decried the speed, secrecy, and lack of legal support that characterised the exercise.

The “Home Office is playing politics with people’s lives. We have not done anything wrong other than cry for help.”

The Guardian of London report had described the deportation as record-breaking saying the Home Office confirmed the action as part of a broader crackdown on immigration.

The exercise, according to the report, has seen the deportation of over 3,600 people since the Labour government came to power in July.

The report said the news platform had interviewed four Nigerian men held at Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick before their deportation.

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One of them, who had been in the UK for 15 years seeking asylum, reportedly expressed his distress thus: “I have no criminal record, but the Home Office has refused my claim.”

This was even as another man revealed he had been a victim of trafficking and bore torture scars, yet his asylum claim had also been rejected.