Thread by @IRR_News

OUT NOW: #ImpunityEntrenched Part 1
🛂 POLICING THE BORDERS

Is this the end of asylum?

The below THREAD 🧵 provides a summary of border and immigration legislation and policy introduced last year.

For the full analysis, read here ⬇️
irr.org.uk/article/polici…

The hostile reception for asylum seekers is extended to refugees in the Nationality & Borders Bill, which expands policies of exclusion, criminalisation and deportation. This thread will critique the bill and review other important developments from 2021
irr.org.uk/article/polici…

The N&B Bill puts into legislation Patel’s New Plan for Immigration.

The public consultation on it received over 8,500 responses, 75% opposing.

Against normal practice, the government didn't publish these, and published the Bill before responding. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

The Nationality & Borders bill poses an existential threat to the right to asylum, in its measures to stop spontaneous refugee arrivals while providing no safe and legal alternative. #ImpunityEntrenched
irr.org.uk/policing-the-b…

Nor does the Bill provide any routes to family reunion for asylum seekers, even for unaccompanied minors with relatives in the UK.

This is in breach of the government’s pledge to replace the family reunion provisions of the Dublin regulation after Brexit.

The Bill differentiates refugees according to their mode of arrival, penalising those not coming directly from the country of persecution, who may be declared inadmissible, & liable to be ‘offshored’ - removed to any safe country which will have them, for processing or for good.

This is the government’s stated preferred option, and ministers have reportedly considered Ascension Island, or Albania, strongly denied by the Albanian government, or Rwanda.

So far no country has agreed. inews.co.uk/news/politics/…

Ministers say the target of the Bill’s criminalisation provisions is ‘criminal gangs’, but they will allow refugees arriving without authorisation to go to prison for up to 4 years. As this contravenes Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, the Bill rewrites the Article

Persons helping refugees to arrive and claim asylum in the UK for humanitarian reasons and not 'for gain' will risk a life sentence, although a late amendment, following public outcry, creates a legal exemption for rescuers including the @RNLI. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…

The Home Office aims to make Channel crossings ‘unviable’ through operational measures and legislation including aerial surveillance, paying France to deploy more vehicles and beach patrols - and plans for physical 'pushbacks' of boats to French waters. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-584959…

Border Force officials have been seen training for pushbacks using jet-skis, despite warnings from the government’s own lawyers that the practice puts lives at risk and breaches international law. Just today it was announced that the army will be deployed theguardian.com/world/2022/jan…

The phrase ‘liquid graveyard’, often applied to the Mediterranean, is now becoming applicable to the Channel crossing, where the securitised border regime has led to at least 43 boat-related deaths in the last 18 months. irr.org.uk/article/deadly…

Of these, 27 people - 17 men, 7 women (1 pregnant) and 3 children, almost all identified as Iranian Kurds, died on 24 November, when their dinghy sank off the French coast after distress calls to both French and English coastguards were allegedly ignored. theguardian.com/world/2021/dec…

.@pcs_union, representing Border Force officials, say officials will if necessary disrupt pushback operations, and has joined @Care4Calais in a legal challenge to the ‘unlawful, unworkable' and 'morally reprehensible’ policy – one of 3 legal challenges. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/n…

It is impossible to disagree with Priti Patel’s constant refrain that the asylum system is ‘broken’ and needs ‘wholesale reform’.

The @IndependentCI’s November report on asylum decision-making found it failing in 9 separate ways, including chronic delays
gov.uk/government/pub…

⏳The report found that the wait for an asylum decision was 449 days in 2020, almost double that in 2017, and 550 days for unaccompanied children, whose claims should be prioritised.

When Patel talks of a ‘broken’ asylum system, she means simply the fact of asylum - that people travel to the UK and claim asylum, in accordance with the 1951 Refugee Convention, despite the efforts of successive governments since the 1980s to prevent them.

The reception and treatment of those making the Channel crossing is the worst it has ever been, according to @_KRAN_ helping new arrivals in Kent, who describe it as ‘performative cruelty’. theguardian.com/world/2021/nov…

After 5-year-old Afghan refugee Mohammed was killed falling from a Sheffield hotel window, days after his family had been housed there, it emerged the Home Office were warned about safety concerns but failed to carry out checks before moving the family in. theguardian.com/world/2021/aug…

Freedom of Information requests from @LInvestigates revealed in October that 95 people living in asylum accommodation had died since 2016 – nearly twice as many as the 50 disclosed in previous FOI requests.

Frequently the cause of death is not disclosed.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/o…

The Home Office is still housing asylum seekers in barracks too.

Penally (Wales) was closed after an @IndependentCI & @HMIPrisonsnews report described it and Napier (near Folkestone) as ‘squalid and unsafe’.

Napier is set to be used for a further 5 years
kentonline.co.uk/folkestone/new…

CLAUSE 9

Of the nationality provisions of the Nationality & Borders Bill, there is a late amendment allowing ministers to revoke citizenship without notice, in a range of circumstances.

More on Clause 9 in this THREAD

https://twitter.com/IRR_News/status/1460996087846780944?s=20

If the amendment is passed, many won’t know they are no longer British until they try to return home, or need help from the British Embassy.

Deprivation powers have overwhelmingly been used against British Muslims, and give rise to a sense of precarity in minority communities.

DEPORTATIONS
In July, the Home Office conducted the first mass deportation to Zimbabwe in decades, allegedly the result of a ‘secret deal’

@DetentionAction called it a ‘grubby operation’ that ‘risks delivering democracy activists to political persecution’
theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/j…

Of 90 proposed passengers on a deportation flight to Jamaica in August, only 7 left:

2 were in their 60s.
1 suffered from mental confusion.
1 had recently lost a child to ‘medical negligence’.
5 had indications of trafficking linked to county lines.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/a…

2 deportation flights of Vietnamese nationals led to a legal challenge, on the basis that people showing indicators of trafficking were being processed and rejected in a ‘detained fast track’. 4/5 negative decisions on trafficking were overturned on appeal theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/j…

WINDRUSH
The treatment of the Windrush victims under the compensation scheme is an enduring shame.

By November, 3 and a half years after the scandal broke, only 864 of the estimated 15,000 victims had received any compensation. 23 people had died waiting theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/n…

The questioning of applicants and the evidence demanded was too similar to the nightmare which they were meant to be compensated for, making it unsurprising that only 3,000 people had applied. In July, @CommonsPAC declared the scheme unfit for purpose. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/j…

RESISTANCE
There has been strong resistance and protest against these operations and proposals – from the 6,000+ responses opposing the New Plan for Immigration to the 300,000 signatories to the petition against clause 9 of the Nationality and Borders Bill
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/6015…

Numerous demonstrations and days of action have supported refugees. Following right-wing attacks on Channel rescues, donations to the @RNLI tripled, with the charity ‘inundated with donations and messages of support’. theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/j…

And in May, hundreds of local people chanting ‘These are our neighbours, let them go’ surrounded a UK immigration enforcement van in Kenmure Street, Glasgow, forcing officials eventually to release two men they had detained in a dawn raid. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/m…

The call for a radical re-setting of migration and asylum policy so that it is rights-based, not the ‘punish-&-control’ model that fails to protect anyone except the corporations profiting from it, is spreading irr.org.uk/article/divest…

Read the full analysis including many more important developments in part 1 of our 5-part series, #ImpunityEntrenched

irr.org.uk/article/polici…