IT PASSED by almost unnoticed. A mother and her two young children seeking asylum in Scotland were ordered to report to an immigration office. They thought it was routine - but half an hour later they were on their way to a cell in Dungavel detention centre. What happened to Zahra Byansi and her sons 13 days ago sent a chill of fear through Scotland’s refugee community that has never been felt before. It also marked the development of a new - and some would say sinister - strategy by the Home Office immigration service in how its officers target, detain and deport asylum seekers with children.
The Byansi case, and other cases investigated by the Sunday Herald, has exposed how the Home Office is now luring refugee families with children to immigration offices and detaining them en masse. All asylum seekers have to report - or “sign on” - regularly at immigration offices, usually once a week. However, immigration officials in Scotland are now ordering entire families - mum, dad, sons, daughters - to attend the offices. Once there, they are immediately detained, taken to a detention centre such as Dungavel, outside Glasgow, and told that they are to be deported within days.
Refugees and opponents of the current policy on handling the removal of asylum seekers say that this new tactic will have one inevitable outcome: asylum seekers and their families will simply not report to immigration as they will fear deportation, and instead go on the run with their children.
This new policy has been created to replace the infamous “dawn raids”. Each dawn raid featured up to a dozen immigration officers, clad in body armour, raiding the homes of asylum seekers with children, handcuffing the father and older sons, separating mothers from children and taking the the family into custody pending deportation. The policy provoked disgust in Scotland, putting the first minister under enormous pressure to stop such tactics.
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In areas such as Kingsway in Glasgow - where Byansi lived - locals were so angry at the practice of dawn raids that they started patrolling the streets at 4am to keep an eye out for immigration vans. If vans were spotted, they’d text warnings to asylum seekers. Some neighbours are considering adopting the children of asylum seekers to save them from being returned to warzones and desperation in their home countries.
Byansi’s case also features another new tactic thought up by immigration - again seemingly designed to take the heat off the Scottish government. Rather than being kept in Dungavel pending removal, Byansi was taken to the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre near Bedford in England. When refugee families who have lived in Scottish communities end up in Dungavel, the detention usually results in newspaper headlines, mass protests and embarrassment in Holyrood. But now, opponents of the system say, families are “taken out of sight and out of mind” to English detention centres, meaning protest and media clamour are conveniently circumvented. “If the public doesn’t know that a family is in detention, then they won’t be outraged,” says veteran campaigner Rosie Kane MSP of the Scottish Socialist Party.
Byansi’s story started at 4.30pm on January 8 when she arrived to report at an immigration office in Glasgow. She’d been told to bring her children with her. With little or no ceremony, Byansi and her sons were taken into a side room and summarily detained. Her two children, Faisal, aged 12, and five-year-old Rahim, were still in their school uniforms. When Byansi asked for a solicitor, she was told “save your breath”. By 6.30pm she and her children were in a cell in Dungavel.
They remained there for six days before transferral to Yarl’s Wood. The family was due to be deported on January 17, but a last-minute legal move by her lawyer saw the High Court in England agree to hear a judicial review of the case. It’s her last chance to stay in Britain. It could take the courts five months before a judge hears the case. Byansi remains in Yarl’s Wood today, and will have to stay there for the duration of the legal process unless the courts grant her bail.
This exposes another failure in the British asylum system. The UK government has promised the international community that it will only detain children, along with their families, just prior to deportation. Children are meant to be held for no more than a day or two.
But Byansi’s children have now been in custody for nearly two weeks, and could end up spending six months behind bars. The government’s treatment of asylum-seeking families in Scotland has now incurred the wrath of the United Nation’s Refugee Agency, the UN’s High Commission on Human Rights, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Amnesty International.
On Tuesday, friends and supporters of Byansi hired a mini-van and drove the 400 miles from Glasgow to Yarl’s Wood to visit her, believing she was to be deported the next day. When they arrived, they took a photograph to commemorate their friend, with around six people holding up a placard saying “Free Zahra”. Detention centre guards then refused the group entrance for organising an “illegal protest” and police were called. Unimpressed by the draconian behaviour of the guards, officers negotiated on behalf of Byansi’s friends. Eventually, one person was allowed to see her.
In an interview with the Sunday Herald inside Yarl’s Wood, Byansi said the effect of detention on her children was “overwhelming and traumatic”. Byansi is an articulate, intelligent woman who became an activist herself, protesting against the treatment of refugees. Friends believe her high profile caused her to be targeted for removal.
“My youngest child has cried and cried,” she says. The family dread being returned to Uganda. Her husband was a target of both the government and rebel forces, and disappeared. Byansi doesn’t know if he is alive or dead, but fears for her own sand her children’s lives if they are deported. “We won’t be safe,” she says. “I could end up with a bullet in my head. Why doesn’t the Home Office believe me? It’s dehumanising. I’m seen as a number, not a woman with children who’s at risk.
“The British government picks on the weakest targets - women and children. They say I’m a liar, that I am not fit to live in your country. Isn’t Britain meant to be one of the world’s best defenders of human rights? The reality is that it is one of the worst abusers of human rights.
“The Home Office is - as John Reid said - not fit for purpose. If I was really an illegal, I would have been in hiding from day one, not reporting to immigration and going through the asylum process. They are throwing out the wrong people. They are keeping me in detention as they say I will go on the run. Where is a mother with two young children going to hide?
“I ran from an unsafe country to the UK to find justice and safety; that’s all I want - a place to call home. Instead, I’ve spent my life here waiting for a knock at the door, to be taken to prison and thrown out. I haven’t even been able to dream about what a free life would be like for my family in Britain. If you have no security, you have no dreams.”
There were, Byansi says, more than 30 families in Dungavel when she was there. Three were transferred with her to Yarl’s Wood. The most recent Home Office statistics show that in one year Britain detained 795 children aged under five; 585 children aged 5-11; 395 children aged 12-16; and 85 aged 17.
Byansi sees the removal process as Kafkaesque and soullessly bureaucratic. “The system doesn’t see people as human beings,” she says. “When orders are given to remove you, the process begins and there’s nothing that can stop it. I can only trust that God will not abandon my sons and I.”
Life in Yarl’s Wood, she says, is like that of a prisoner. “We live in a cell. All I see is locks, high fences, razor wire and guards. Our liberty has been taken away.” She laughs bitterly when asked about the quality of the education offered to her boys. “They teach them nothing. The kids just sit and talk to each other.”
Byansi recognises that she “probably made a good target for the Home Office” because of her “loud mouth”. A play was written about her fight for asylum and staged in Glasgow. The demos she took part in - outside Dungavel, in George Square and in front of the Scottish parliament - and the speeches she gave at these events were, she says, not an attempt to rabble-rouse but an effort to educate other asylum seekers about the reality of Britain’s immigration system.
“Jack McConnell and John Reid should come to the communities that asylum seekers live in to find out the reality of their lives,” Byansi adds. “They should visit the schools our children go to and the homes we live in. Seeing is believing. They’d see through our eyes and understand the pain of our lives. Jack McConnell promised he would change the way that asylum seekers with children were treated. But he hasn’t - and the proof of that is that my children and I are in custody. All the government has done is to ship the problem from Scotland and Dungavel to England so they don’t have to face any more embarrassment.”
Byansi remained calm and cool throughout the interview in the visiting room of Yarl’s Wood, but when she started to talk about her imminent deportation, her composure began to crack. “I am jealous of the dogs on the streets of this country,” she says. “They’re free to run where they please. I am in a cell and watched every minute.
“Immigration officials keep patting my son on the head and telling me how well-behaved he is. If that’s so, why will they cuff me and throw my well-behaved son out of their country? They’ve stolen the innocence of my children by putting them in here. They know more about immigration policy than about Santa. And if they do throw me out, well, then there will be one less figure on the asylum statistics, but that is not going to end illegal immigration, is it?”
DAWN RAIDS: a brief history
THE treatment of asylum seekers living in Scotland at the hands of the Westminster government, has been a continual source of embarrassment for Holyrood. With immigration a reserved power, there is nothing Scottish ministers can do to change how refugees are treated. That has left MSPs looking weak or cruel in the eyes of the public.
The policy of “dawn raids” only exacerbated public disgust and increased pressure on Holyrood ministers who were forced into silent acquiesence with Westminster’s tactics.
The standard statement from the Justice Ministry and the first minister’s office when asked for a response following a raid on a refugee family is: “We cannot comment as immigration is a matter reserved for Westminster. Please contact the Home Office.” The Home Office refuses to comment on individual cases.
But Scotland would not accept this. Protests, rallies and condemnation followed. Newspapers were filled with stories of young children being sent back to countries wracked by violence and poverty. Voters were disgusted at the idea of children being locked up in detention centres. Opposition parties piled the pressure on Jack McConnell.
McConnell was eventually forced to hold talks with the Home Office, but he was rebuffed when he sought a separate “protocol” for Scotland’s asylum seekers.
Public outrage, however, led to a decline in the number of dawn raids. Protesters demonstrated outside homes while raids were taking place, forcing immigration officers to call off some of their operations.
It seems the tactic of luring families to immigration offices and then detaining them has now been designed to overcome Scotland’s innate hostility towards the notorious dawn raids policy.
The Sunday Herald - 21/01/07
http://www.sundayherald.com/analysis/analysis/display.var.1137131.0.0.php
