In his initial acknowledgement of wrongful deportations, Sajid Javid said 63 members of the Windrush generation could have been wrongfully removed, 32 of whom were labelled foreign national offenders. In his subsequent update on the numbers of wrongly deported people, the UK home secretary said after a new analysis of files that the number of people who had been mistakenly removed from the UK had gone up to 83, but he said he was no longer including foreign national offenders in the count and he was making a “purposeful distinction between criminal and other cases”. Once people with convictions are included, the total number of wrongful deportations is likely to be much larger.
Jameson, whose real name is being withheld because of his embarrassment about his criminal conviction, was deported on 5 June 2013. Because he had tried to kill himself twice in the detention centre while he awaited deportation, he was accompanied on the British Airways flight by two medical assistants and two guards. He was handcuffed all the time.
“I was very calm, because that is what the medication does, but I was also really scared,” he says. He was driven straight from the airport in Jamaica to a mental health facility and left there.
After a lifetime out of the country he had no ties in Jamaica. As a child in the UK he remembers being abused in the streets. “I was called black monkey, asked if I came on the banana boat, and told go back home,” he says. Back in Jamaica he is seen as an alien. “I’ve been called names – deportee, foreign. I’ve been threatened. I often feel frightened.”
For a while he has been staying in a derelict, roofless Police Federation building in downtown Kingston, sleeping on a bit of cardboard next to piles of rubble, broken glass and rotting rafters. “I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight. I don’t have stable meals, I sleep in very disgusting places, old buildings, abandoned shops and houses.” He describes Kingston as a very violent place and says he witnessed a number of murders while living on the streets. “They have deported me to a place which is a war zone.”
Since being deported he has lost his flat in London, and the contents have been thrown away. He keeps all his Home Office information in a black plastic bag, which he carries with him. He is struggling to retain contact with his girlfriend and two teenage stepdaughters who had him as a father figure for nine years. He tries to speak to them a couple of times a week. “I miss them. I keep up with their news.”
Jameson, 58, says he was brought to London when he was six in 1966 by his grandmother, travelling on her passport, because his mother in Jamaica was unable to look after him. He says he realised at about the age of eight that his grandmother was an alcoholic and was also unable to care for him properly.
READ FULL ARTICLE ON THE GUARDIAN HERE https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/10/windrush-people-wrongly-deported-jamaica-criminal-offence?CMP=share_btn_tw