Pressure on the Home Office is building over its failure to find 49 people who may have been wrongfully deported to Commonwealth countries.
Members of the group, which had been held in UK detention centres, were flown to Ghana and Nigeria between March and September last year before the Windrush scandal erupted. There has been no specific attempt by the Home Office to inform the 49 deportees of the existence of the Windrush taskforce.
Home Office minister Caroline Nokes said those concerned could visit a government website for information, but the existence of this online platform and the fact that a person may be able to make an application has not officially been brought to the deportees’ attention. It was felt that as the Home Office has the capacity to deny someone of their rights, to separate them from their loved ones and remove them from the country, it should at a minimum locate them and help them come home if eligible.
The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said the cases highlighted how incompetent the government’s immigration policy was as the Windrush generation includes persons other than just those who came from the Caribbean.
The Home Office admitted last month that the number of Windrush generation known to have been wrongly deported or detained was likely to rise from the figure of 164 because officials had misclassified a number of them as criminals and excluded them from the count. A Home Office spokesperson said any person who believes they are protected under the provisions of the Immigration Act 1971 should contact the Windrush taskforce who will help to identify their current status.
