A deportation flight carrying 29 people landed in Jamaica from the UK on Wednesday amid concern over Home Office tactics.
More than 50 foreign national offenders who were being held in detention centres had reportedly been due to leave on the flight. But many of them were able to have their removal cancelled after their lawyers took action.
The Titian Airways flight was not listed on the arrivals board at Kingston’s Norman Manley airport when it touched down from Birmingham at 1.43pm local time on Wednesday.
The Home Office initially indicated many of those due to be deported were rapists and murderers. Officials provided a breakdown of crimes committed by the offenders on Wednesday that said one person on the flight had been convicted of murder and four of various sexual offences including rape.
Fourteen people on the flight – almost half of those being deported – had been convicted of drugs offences. Six had been convicted of violent crimes including grievous bodily harm and battery, and three of firearms and weapon offences. One person’s conviction was for dangerous driving.
The Home Office said the total combined sentences of the 28 men and one woman on the flight amounted to more than 150 years. Lawyers, human rights activists and others have expressed concern about the charter flight and the last-minute nature of the decisions to remove some people from it.
As it landed the plane went to a far corner of the airstrip and police vehicles quickly gathered around it.
Officers from the Jamaica Constabulary Force went on board, checked the passenger list and taking people off one by one. It took about an hour before a convoy of vehicles left the airport – two police cars with flashing blue lights, accompanied by unmarked SUVs, a white police coach and an open-backed truck carrying the passengers’ luggage. They had been restricted to a suitcase each so it was barely a quarter full.
They were taken to Harman Barracks, in downtown Kingston, to be processed. About 40 family members, along with onlookers and the press, waited at the gates.
A woman in her 70s was waiting for her son and said he had been forced to leave behind the family he raised in the UK. He had travelled frequently to Jamaica before being convicted and jailed for an assault with a knife and later held in a deportation centre.
“He has friends who care for him very much up there [in the UK],” she said. “He has six kids there and five here, he never forgets his family.” She said he had been fighting deportation and his lawyers managed to get him off a flight in 2018 but not this time. “He didn’t know he was going to be on this flight, it was last night he found out. If he knew before, people would’ve got things to him, but he’s with his family so he doesn’t have to worry.”
Some people waiting became irate with local media filming the proceedings.
One woman, who referred to herself as La La, said she was waiting for a friend. She added: “The reason why some people come back here with nothing is because they forget their people, they lose contact with friends and family and in those cases, they come back to an island which they may have left as a child. All those years they’ve been there, they do something and they send them back. Everyone for them is over there [in the UK], often their parents but they haven’t got anyone here, you’re sending them back to die.”
Anyone without relatives to stay with would be helped by the National Organisation for Deported Migrants (NODM) and other housing charities, said Oswald Dawkins, who runs the NODM.
He felt most of those on board would have someone they knew on the island, but he felt the Jamaican government should be doing more to help those sent back. “We have a flight that arrives here every month from the US but most people don’t even realise it, not even the media,” he said.
There are also calls for the UK government to change its stance. The former prisons ombudsman Stephen Shaw, who has conducted two independent reviews of immigration detention for the Home Office, said the inclusion of people who had lived in the UK since childhood on the flights was “very cruel”.
Shaw recommended in a report published in July 2018 that foreign national offenders who had been in the UK since childhood should not be removed.
Omar Khan, of the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, expressed concern about the late cancellation of some detainees’ places on the flight: “These ad hoc reprieves are a reflection of the dysfunctional nature of the system.” He raised concerns about the government’s decision to go ahead with the deportation flight before the publication of the Windrush lessons learned review.
Some people were told they would not be flying a few hours before the plane was due to leave. Others were removed from the flight just before it took off and returned to detention centres.
Shaw said that while the legislation introduced in 2007 was clear that those who had served sentences of more than a year should be deported, there was some room for manoeuvre. “The Home Office does have some discretion on this issue. It can place much higher value on family ties. It just needs to change its approach. It’s very cruel to remove people in this way.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “The law requires that we seek to deport foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality by committing crimes in the UK. This ensures we keep the public safe.”
