UK asylum law

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Hotel Limbo

Part Two
17 AUGUST 2021
       
Image: Organising aid and legal help at the East London Mosque.
This is the second in a short series of diary entries. Read Part One here.

Read our interview with Hannah Marwood of Care4Calais for more on how their volunteers try to support asylum seekers in hotels during the Covid pandemic.

See our main Fortress UK page for more on the basics of asylum law, on how to seek asylum in the UK, how lawyers can help, and on the Home Office’s recent use of military barracks to house asylum seekers.

المقال باللغة العربية — Some of these articles are also available in Arabic.


The East London Mosque, Whitechapel. 3 August 2021.


The new arrival

He and his brothers left Syria some six years ago. He tells us there was a time when he had still hoped the nations of the world would step in to remove Assad and bring the war to an end. But then, he says, he saw that the US was giving a green light to Assad to kill people, and that the world had decided to keep the dictatorship in place. He believes all Syrians would prefer to go home if it was safe. He stayed close to home for many years, living in Turkey. Now he says Turkey is not safe either. He has been in the UK just two weeks.

We are talking in a basement room in the East London Mosque. The mosque has allowed an NGO called Life Seekers Aid to use this room to distribute clothes and shoes to newly arrived asylum seekers who are staying in a nearby hotel. The man we are chatting to is one of several Syrians amongst the group of asylum seekers who have come today, along with Sudanese and Eritreans. And the activist from Life Seekers Aid who invited us here is also Syrian, but we will return to him in a moment.

Back to our conversation with the new arrival. He comes from southern Syria, and he still has family left behind, his mother and sisters who did not feel able to leave. He comes from a rural area, and he says his mother and many like her would prefer to die in Syria than leave. His father has already suffered that fate. And now the Assad regime is renewing its attacks on neighbourhoods in Daraa, south Syria. If the bombing gets close, his mother might move to Damascus for a few weeks, he says. But she will never leave the country. She holds on to a traditional way of life, he tells us. He doesn’t think she could face living in the UK.

Before his exile from Syria, he had already left village life and gone to university in Damascus. Then the revolution came, and the war. The brothers took different paths in those years, to London, to Lebanon, and he himself went to Turkey. He spent a year learning the language there, and then went back to university as a postgraduate. But he says he was forced out of university in Turkey by anti-Syrian prejudice amongst the university staff.

When he had first arrived in Turkey, Syrians had been welcomed, he remembers, but the years since have brought a steep rise in racism. Eventually, he felt it was too dangerous for him as a Syrian to be out on the street after six in the evening. Syrians risk being attacked, stabbed, or run over. There have been a lot of so-called accidents happening to Syrians in Turkey, he says.

His brother in Lebanon had also experienced increasing prejudice and had left for the UK, and so he too decided to join his brothers in London. He tried applying at the British consulate for a visa, but was refused. The only way to be together with his brothers again was to travel ‘illegally’ he says.

When he arrived two weeks ago and claimed asylum, he wasn’t given an initial asylum interview, nor was he given an asylum application registration number. Others in the same hotel have had the same experience. This means they have no way of accessing any other support that they should be getting. He is luckier than many of the others here, he tells us, as one of his brothers living in London came to see him and gave him money to keep him going.


The lawyer

As well as clothes distribution, today is also importantly about connecting these new arrivals with lawyers. Hilary Brown of Virgo Consultancy Services is here with two of her colleagues. They are a legal firm with offices in London and Cardiff. We have a quick chat in a quiet period after the first few visitors have been and gone. We expect many more to come in soon.

We ask Hilary Brown about the people she is seeing today, and the issue of them not having asylum application registration numbers. She says yes, there seem to be many people here with no documentation from the Home Office except a tenancy agreement to show that they are staying in the hotel. “Many of them should have several different pieces of documentation, including photographic documentation,” she explains. It’s not clear to her why they weren’t given the proper papers, as they’ve all been encountered by the Home Office and some information about them has been recorded in their hotel tenancy documents. This is the first time she’s seen this kind of situation on this scale.

It’s through Life Seekers Aid that Hilary Brown and her colleagues came to be here today. Life Seekers Aid is a very new organisation, run by asylum seekers and refugees. It began life as CROP, short for Camp Residents of Penally. This was the residents’ union organised last year inside Penally Camp, one of the Ministry of Defence sites used by the Home Office as contingency accommodation for asylum seekers during the pandemic. Virgo was one of the first law firms to get access to Penally Camp—Hilary Brown describes conditions there as ‘abysmal’—and they managed to get many of their clients moved out.

“We did work with other organisations to bring pressure to get the camp closed down,” Hilary Brown tells us. We were absolutely determined that it was something that we were going to do. It was wholly inappropriate to put men fleeing all kinds of oppressive regimes from countries all over the world into a camp that was so obviously a military base. The first thing that you saw as you walked in through the big gates were shooting targets, wholly inappropriate.”

After the closure of Penally Camp, CROP reinvented themselves as Life Seekers Aid, and turned to try and help people in Napier Barracks. The barracks remain open, despite severely critical reports by David Bolt, the previous Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, and by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons, as well as a damning judgment by Mr Justice Linden in a case brought against the Home Secretary by six Napier residents.

Hilary Brown is planning her first visit to Napier the next day, and hopes to join with other organisations who are trying to get that closed down as well. Virgo is unlike many other law firms dealing with asylum and immigration, she explains, because they also deal with housing and public law. “So if there are any legal challenges to any authority, that’s something we do,” she says. “And we see that there are a number of public law challenges that come out of asylum work, and so we like to think that we’re able to offer a kind of one stop shop.”

As well as her legal work, Hilary Brown is also chair of Butetown Community Centre, which is a local community centre in Cardiff. As Penally Camp closed, many of the men there were relocated to Cardiff. Together with Life Seekers Aid the Butetown Community Centre has held a couple of aid distribution events for asylum seekers, the first one last April. “We assisted 160 asylum seekers on that day,” she tells us. “We fed everybody, and we made lots of friends. And we repeated the event in May for women and families. So initiatives such as these are so much needed.”

Today, a number of the asylum seekers from the hotel have been helping fold and arrange the clothes on long tables. The clothes and shoes were left over after those Cardiff events at the community centre. The Virgo Consultancy Services lawyers had loaded up their two cars yesterday with as many bags as they could fit, and then drove them up to London. If they had a larger vehicle, there was a lot more they could have brought, they tell us.

We have had several conversations in the past months with people from a range of organisations who were focused on one or another approach towards Penally Camp or Napier Barracks, political action, aid, or providing legal help. At times there have been tensions between different approaches, but also several people have said that it was the combined effect that brought success in closing Penally Camp. So we ask Hilary Brown about how she finds legal action, aid, and activism work together.

“Well, I think they always will work together because the help you give asylum seekers often just doesn’t stop at five o’clock,” she says. “The legal work does finish at five thirty, but then after that I put on a different hat and I go into the community and I continue to support in any way I can, and you get to learn so much more about their needs and some of the difficulties that they’ve faced when you’re in not such a formal space.”

So the aid work enriches the understanding she needs in her legal work. There’s also a suggestion that aid work can lead to the organising needed for political activism. “Look around today,” she says. “You know, some of these men have little or nothing, but they’ve come here to help and work and sort out clothes for their friends.”


Life Seekers Aid

The activist from Life Seekers Aid has been acting as interpreter between the lawyers and the mostly Arabic speaking asylum seekers. He finds that people from other Arabic-speaking countries have little problem understanding his dialect. He says this is because of the international popularity of Syrian TV drama. Following his first encounter with asylum seekers outside the hotel, he has been building a WhatsApp group with them to spread the news about today. Unfortunately this method hasn’t reached non-Arabic speakers in the hotel, nor has he been able to get in contact with any of the women asylum seekers reported to be staying there. He expects about fifty people in all to come.

He explains to us how he found out about this hotel and its population of new arrivals. For some time he has been working together with Maddie Harris of Humans For Rights Network to help residents of Napier Barracks. Then they heard of the death of Bukhariri Afifi Ahmad at The Crowne Plaza Hotel. “We came to know about this case  from one of the Care4Calais volunteers inside the Crowne Plaza two weeks ago,” he explains. “They met him in France before, and then they met him again in the Crowne Plaza. And he was so happy to see the volunteer from Care4Calais. He told them that he knew that now he was saved because of how they helped before. Poor chap, he was 24 years old. He was found dead in his room.

He hasn’t yet been to the Crowne Plaza himself, but together with Maddie Harris he went to Bukhariri Afifi Ahmad’s funeral, which was held here at the East London Mosque. Care4Calais and another organisation had arranged a bus to bring Crowne Plaza residents.

Talking to friends of Bukhariri Afifi Ahmad, he was struck by the degree of hostility there seems to be between staff and residents. Many of the asylum seekers felt unsafe and needed help. The cause of death is still unclear, he tells us. “The police considered his room a crime scene, and they were investigating, and then they said it’s a natural death.”

After the funeral, Maddie and he were walking to fetch his bike when they saw a group of men standing outside a nearby hotel smoking. From their clothes, and from the fact that they were wearing flip-flop sandals despite the rain, they realised they were asylum seekers and stopped to talk to them.

Some of the men had just arrived that day at the hotel, others the day before. The security guard on the door said that the first asylum seekers to arrive in the hotel had come Monday. This was Saturday, so five days ago. There were already over two hundred, some sharing rooms. So Maddie Harris set up the WhatsApp group, they both started adding people, and they started reaching out to other organisations.

Here we have to cut short our conversation. Several people are arriving in the basement room now. All are directed to talk to one of the lawyers. One already has legal representation, but he is the exception.

Most of the men do not speak English. The activist from Life Seekers Aid is having to interpret for as many as three people at once. At the same time he is explaining to others waiting about the lawyers, and about legal aid. And then his phone rings as well. Form-filling pauses while he takes the call.

When people sign up with the law firm, they are asked if they have any documents from the Home Office. Sometimes names are mis-spelled or birth dates recorded wrongly. Where are you from? There are several men from Sudan in this group, there are Kurds from Iran or Iraq, and there are also more Syrians.

They are asked if they are married. If so, the lawyers will possibly have to help apply for family reunion at a later stage. They are asked if they have children? Yes, says an older man. Others interpret for him. This youth standing next to him is his son, they tell the lawyers.

One Syrian man has a very visible eye infection. Because he has not been given an asylum application registration number, he hasn’t been able to get medical care. After she has taking his details, Hilary Brown gets on the phone and calls someone to help get him a doctor.


Postscript: Anti-Syrian violence in Turkey

The new arrival we spoke to in Whitechapel had talked about the hostility he experienced as a Syrian refugee in Turkey. The danger to refugees in Turkey was made clear just over a week later, when on the 11th of August a mob of hundreds of people converged on the suburb of Altindag in the Turkish capital Ankara and attacked the homes of Syrians, stoning houses, destroying shops, smashing cars, and lighting bonfires in the streets.

Turkish opposition politicians have for a number of years encouraged anti-refugee sentiment as a means to gain popular support. The majority of Syrian refugees in the region are in Turkey, 3.69 million out of a total of 5.63 million according to UN figures.

Turkey hosts more than three times the number of Syrian refugees as all European countries combined—there are 1.07 million Syrian refugees who have been granted protection in European states, and over half of those are in Germany. The number of Syrian refugees in the UK is a small fraction of the number in Europe, with only 27,000 granted asylum up to 2019, of whom 19,000 came to the UK via the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme.

An added factor in Turkey is a rising number of Afghans fleeing the worsening situation in their home country and travelling to Turkey via Iran. The Turkish government is responding by building a wall along Turkey’s border with Iran, similar to the wall already built along the Turkish-Syrian border which serves to trap millions of displaced people within Syria’s borders. Turkey’s wall along the Syrian border was built as a result of a six billion euro deal with the European Union in 2016, where the EU paid Turkey to stop refugees fleeing to Greece and the wider EU.

Today, people fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and other dangerous countries, continue to cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, but in much smaller numbers than five or six years ago. There is mounting evidence of Greek authorities conducting illegal pushbacks of refugees, where people who arrive in Greece are forced back to Turkish territory and abandoned.

In light of this, refugee rights advocates raised objections when the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel visited Greece to see what the UK could learn from their response to refugees. That trip, with a photo opportunity of the Home Secretary looking at plans for a new closed camp for refugees in Greece, came the day after our visit to Whitechapel.

This is the second in a short series of diary entries on hotels used as contingency accommodation for asylum seekers. Read Part One here.


Illustration by Peggy Jacobs Strom.
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Hotel Limbo

Part One
16 AUGUST 2021
       
Photo: A resident of The Crowne Plaza Hotel joins a demonstration outside on 31 July 2021.
This is the first in a short series of diary entries. Read Part Two here.

Read our interview with Hannah Marwood of Care4Calais for more on how their volunteers try to support asylum seekers in hotels during the Covid pandemic.

See our main Fortress UK page for more on the basics of asylum law, on how to seek asylum in the UK, how lawyers can help, and on the Home Office’s recent use of military barracks to house asylum seekers.

المقال باللغة العربية — Some of these articles are also available in Arabic.


The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Heathrow. 31 July 2021.

“Maybe you’ve heard the news from two weeks ago, the guy who died here.”

“He was somebody who died here. We were friends.”

The Crowne Plaza Hotel near Heathrow Airport in west London is one of the many hotels now being used during the pandemic as contingency accommodation for asylum seekers. On the evening of Saturday 17 July, two weeks ago this day, Bukhariri Afifi Ahmad, a young asylum seeker, was found dead in his room at the Crowne Plaza.

“We lost our one brother here. He died inside the room. Two days he was inside. We asked them to open. They said wait. From Friday, we hadn’t seen him.”

“They wouldn’t look.”

“On Saturday, everybody was after them to open the room. They said no, you have to wait. You have to go for the police. After two days the police came, and they opened. He had died inside the room. We don’t know the reason he died.”

“We don’t know the cause of death.”

“He was our best friend. In one year, three people have died inside here.”

We are at a demonstration outside the hotel. We stand at the back, talking to some of the residents. It’s the last day of July 2021. There were earlier demonstrations here following the unexplained death. On the day after the body of Bukhariri Afifi Ahmad was found, Care4Calais volunteers who were helping people in the hotel posted images on Facebook of residents holding signs in protest. “He is neglected to death,” one sign said. “Asylum seekers are humans,” said another. “Refugee lives matter.”

A second demonstration was held two days after the body was found. Journalists came, as well as asylum campaigners, union activists, and local MP John McDonnell. And now two weeks later this demonstration has been organised by a campaigning group called Movement for Justice. Several residents have come out to watch, and a few hold signs and stand with the Movement For Justice activists.

We are here because for several months we have been interviewing people about Penally Camp and Napier Barracks, two disused military properties where the Home Office decided to house asylum seekers during the pandemic. In both places, asylum seekers protested the conditions. In Penally Camp in Wales, the asylum seekers formed their own union, Camp Residents of Penally, or CROP. With support from local and national organisations—and from several individuals—they successfully campaigned for the camp’s closure. Napier Barracks in Kent is still open.

So we have come to learn more about these hotels which are part of the same contingency accommodation system as Napier Barracks. We meet Antonia from Movement For Justice. While they have been organising at other hotels, this is their first time coming as a group to the Crowne Plaza. “There had already been other deaths we knew of,” she says. “We had to come down and make a connection with the people here, because we know that there’s people that want to fight. That they came out and demonstrated was really positive.”

Movement For Justice opposes immigration detention and deportations. When the pandemic began, the number of people in detention was brought down, and at one point Yarl’s Wood detention centre was emptied out. “Then they started to use it for cross-channel refugees,” Antonia tells us. “Straight from Dover into Yarl’s Wood with no access really to solicitors, often with their phones taken off them. They used it as short term holding facilities for seven days, which means different criteria, where you don’t have the same rights to legal assistance.”

After seven days, people were moved on to contingency accommodation. “Because we did demonstrate over the fence at Yarl’s Wood and made connections, when people were then moved to hotels, we already knew people,” Antonia explains. Crowne Plaza had a worse reputation than other hotels. “Everyone would say the same thing, they hated this place. Some of the hotels, they still look like hotels. This one just looks like a prison.”

It’s true. What had been a normal airport hotel before the pandemic—listed as four star—now has a high hoarding all around the building, a white-painted wall. Most of the grounds are outside of that wall, as is the car park where the demonstrators are chanting. There is a guarded gate in the wall. The grounds outside have grass and trees, but beyond that is the A408 dual carriageway feeding onto the M4 motorway. The traffic is constant. Seen from the air, the Crowne Plaza building has the same layout as Saydnaya Prison in Syria, three wings radiating from a central hub.

Image: The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Heathrow, as seen from above. See our interview with Hannah Marwood of Care4Calais for more background on how aid volunteers are trying to support asylum seekers housed in hotels during the Covid pandemic.

The whole time we’re talking, a succession of speakers from Movement For Justice are taking the microphone, making speeches and leading chants. They talk about having experienced detention, and about the need to fight. There is energy and anger, and a lot of noise. But the only visible audience is the residents. We can’t see any of the staff from here, but we can see some families looking down from hotel balconies. “You have to fight!” one of the speakers shouts to the residents. “Movement For Justice knows how to fight! We know how to win!” The speeches are aimed at the residents, and the chants at the wall.

Most of the people holding signs and chanting in the middle of the paved area seem to be from Movement For Justice, while most of those residents who have come outside the wall are standing to one side, or are walking around behind the demonstration.

Another woman from the group is talking to some of the residents standing back behind the demonstration. She encourages them to join Movement For Justice and asks for their phone numbers. One, an Eritrean, tells her he can’t speak English. “But you’re answering me in English?” she says. As she moves on to try some others, he and his two friends decide to join the protesters and pick up one of their signs. We hear the recruiting activist say to the next resident, “You have to fight!” But he and most of the other residents are still standing back from the chanting visitors.

To Antonia, we say that we have been talking to people who were inside Penally and Napier, hearing about how they organised inside Penally, and how residents found it harder to organise inside Napier where there was a major Covid outbreak. We ask whether Movement For Justice are succeeding in helping people organise inside hotels and hostels?

“Yeah, we’re also trying to tell people the truth, that this is a racist system that you’re dealing with,” Antonia replies. “You may not know it straightaway. It may not be obvious. And you’re certainly told a lot of misleading things.”

Antonia points to what’s happening now in Napier. Following the Covid outbreak there, Napier Barracks was emptied completely. Then in April, the Home Office started moving people in again. They gave the new intake an impression that by staying in Napier, they would get an asylum interview more quickly. “People don’t want to be in limbo, so they take doing the interview. The problem is a fast interview is not a fair interview just because it’s fast. If you’ve only half told your story, if you haven’t known what you needed to talk about because you never talked to anyone about it, and you don’t fully understand it, then you’re screwed.”

“Anyone dealing in this fight needs to be telling the truth about the Home Office system,” Antonia says. “No gloss on it. Because this is a fight. Some people will get asylum from very specific places. But lots of people are in a holding pattern until Priti Patel is in a position to deport them. They’ve reopened charter flights this month, to Zimbabwe for the first time ever, to Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and to Jamaica. And they’re already filling the detention centres to take mass deportations, including people who came here as children, who have been here for decades. Why does anyone imagine that they’re nicer just because you’re from a different country? Those illusions have to be ditched because they stop you realising that you’re in a fight.”

Movement For Justice are clearly focused on political campaigning more than aid. “Yes,” Antonia says, “if it was aid alone, that would be like a sticking plaster on an ever growing wound, where the government is still sticking the knife in.” Without a political fight, the aid is endless, she says. “Because politically you’re set up to fail.”

We talk about a risk some aid volunteers have expressed to us, that aid can end up facilitating places like Napier staying open, even though that’s not what they want to see. “Exactly,” Antonia says, “make it manageable, like being the velvet glove over the iron fist—it’s still punching you.” Working through this can be difficult when faced with an individual who needs help, we suggest. “But that person is also someone who has just navigated their way halfway across the world,” Antonia responds.

“That is a resourceful person who’s already in a fight. They’ve been in a fight all across Europe. If you’ve had to deal with the racism in Italy, in France, in Calais, how you’re treated, and you’ve decided to keep going, that’s not a weak person. That is a strong person. So what is needed? Health care is needed, those practical things, of course. But what is needed is to know how to fight, how to take control of your situation in a British context. If you know how to do that, I don’t doubt that there are plenty of strong people here who will put into action what they need to do, because they’ve already been doing that.”


Not another Europe

The Crowne Plaza residents we talk to say that yes, they have experienced racism in Europe, in France and in Germany, and despite all they are going through here now, a number of them still say the UK is preferable because of the level of racism elsewhere in Europe. “You know your rights,” one man tells us. “And you know the rule. It’s not like another Europe if you know your rights and your responsibility. It’s nice you can walk freely—not feel that maybe the police will catch me because I have no document. In Europe, I could not walk outside. The UK is better.”

Another man agrees with him. “You have a lot of freedom here,” he says. “But this place is no good,” he continues, indicating the Crowne Plaza. He has visited friends of his in other hotels in London where they are living in better conditions.

“Here, they don’t treat us like a human being,” one man tells us. “It’s very dirty food. If you ask them anything, they say ask the Home Office, but you can’t contact the Home Office. You can’t. You can’t. It’s very difficult to contact them. Some people, they don’t know the language, but they don’t do anything for us.

He says that, “Even if you are sick, they just tell you to call one-one-one,” the phone number for the National Health Service’s advice line.

Another tells us, “Some people, they have a GP but they don’t have an Oyster to take a bus,” meaning an Oyster card for London Transport.

“If you have an appointment, you tell them, they say we don’t do anything, you have to call Migrant Help. When you call Migrant Help, they say we will ask the Home Office. You know, the bureaucracy is very, very—you damage your head.”

Migrant Help is a charity that in 2019 was given an exclusive contract by the Home Office for the provision of asylum support services, known as Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility Assistance services (AIRE), making the charity a single point of contact to report issues relating to asylum housing.

The remoteness of the hotel is a big problem. One man says that his friends live more centrally where there are more organisations meeting them. “Here they don’t come,” he says. “I don’t know why.”

“I’m here two months. I have a family here. I have a wife and kid in London. They came before me.”

“A lot of people inside have been here eight months, or one year.”

A young man talks about his frustration with the passing days. “I have friends in Luton, in every place in England,” he says. “But now my friends are all starting school. I’m staying here, sleeping every day. It’s no good. I want to be learning something.”

Unlike Napier Barracks, it isn’t just single men in Crowne Plaza. “There’s a lot of family people inside, a lot of children inside, but they are afraid to go out,” one of the men tells us. “Look, every window is open—they are afraid.” He points at the people looking down from the hotel windows.

“They say if you go outside for a demonstration, your claim will fail,” another man tells us. His friend confirms that staff have been telling residents not to join the demonstration, threatening that they will be reported to the Home Office. He says that staff are lying to intimidate residents against speaking out because they are afraid of losing their jobs, and that staff at the gate have been filming people who join the demonstration.


Strength and vulnerability

Despite the truth in what Antonia said about the strength of many of the residents here, they are in a much more vulnerable position than the visiting demonstrators. Even as they show defiance by coming outside, they will remain in a position of dependency after the visitors leave, and tomorrow and the day after, and for how long they don’t know.

Aspects of life at the Crowne Plaza are similar to what has been reported from Penally Camp and Napier Barracks, even though the building itself is better than dilapidated army huts. What the situations have in common can be described as a culture of hostile neglect.

The limbo situation of people on contingency accommodation is different to that of people in detention who face an immediate crisis of deportation, even though some actions of the Home Office blur the distinction. So can the residents here be pressed into the same mold of activism used with people facing detention? Are the activists who are here telling them to fight also listening to their particular needs and concerns?

Antonia mentioned healthcare as a practical need. From our few conversations with residents, healthcare is a challenge made much harder by the location of the hotel. There is also a massive need for psychosocial support, and for education. Altogether, it seems too big a challenge for a small political activist group to handle alone. But if people are being called on to fight, care needs to be taken that vulnerable and traumatised people are not put at even greater risk.

In our many conversations this year with people invoved in Penally Camp and Napier Barracks, including asylum seekers, activists, aid volunteers, and lawyers, we have heard again and again of the importance of different organisations bringing in varied and complementary approaches, even if they sometimes clashed. Movement For Justice tried to involve other organisations in today’s demonstration, but again the location is a challenge. Antonia mentions particularly that they had some contact with Sudanese organisations, but as she points out, everyone’s been having a hard time over the pandemic.

The language of the fight used by Movement For Justice will strike different audiences in different ways. For some used to a certain political rhetoric, these are straightforward words of resistance. But in calling on survivors of war to fight, there may also be heard an uncomfortable echo of those anti-refugee voices who describe people fleeing war as cowards for not staying home and fighting. The language can also be heard as an extension of—or a response to—the government’s own militarisation of the refugee issue, where both politicians and civil servants portray what should be an issue of human care as if it was a threat of military invasion.

The Movement For Justice activists promise to return to the Crowne Plaza, and we hope to see how their campaign develops.

We still don’t know why Bukhariri Afifi Ahmad died.

The men we have been talking to at the Crowne Plaza are from Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea. Bukhariri Afifi Ahmad was from Sudan.

“He was our best friend,” one of them says again. “We knew him very well. You know, here we don’t say you’re Sudanese, you’re Ethiopian. We are together.”

“We hold each other.”

“We go play together—football. No one’s separate, you know. We love each other more than anything.”


Postscript: Colnbrook detention centre and the #Jamaica50 flight

After the Crowne Plaza demonstration, the Movement For Justice activists went on to demonstrate outside the Colnbrook detention centre, a bus ride away. Some of the Crowne Plaza residents agreed to join them. But to include them in the action, their material needs had to be addressed—they didn’t have Oyster cards for the bus. And so the group had to set off walking along one of the noisy roads to find a shop selling Oyster cards. They later tweeted a series of photos from the day.

Colnbrook is one of the places where people are detained in preparation for Home Office deportation flights. Publicity by campaigners has made it harder for the UK Government to use regular commercial flights for deportations, so instead they charter planes and try to assemble enough people qualifying under the rules for deportation to fill them.

Movement For Justice have been one of several groups campaigning against a deportation flight to Jamaica this summer. Total planned capacity for the Jamaica flight was fifty deportees. The Home Office had drawn up a long list of ninety names, according to May Bulman of the Independent.

Lawyers rather than campaigners emptied the Jamaica flight. Most of the final fifty had their tickets cancelled following legal interventions in the days before departure. Lawyers said the last-minute legal claims were the result of poor access to legal advice for deportees, the Independent reported. When the flight left in the early hours of 11 August, only seven people were deported on it, at an estimated cost of £43,000 a person according to Diane Taylor of the Guardian.

After the flight, Movement For Justice focused on supporting one deportee in particular, a 66 year old man who was described as physically disabled with early stages of dementia. Now as the Home Office proceeds with preparations for further flights to Zimbabwe and Nigeria, Movement For Justice is reporting a rapid rise in Covid cases inside Colnbrook detention centre.


This is the first in a short series of diary entries on hotels used as contingency accommodation for asylum seekers. Read Part Two here.

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Covid, contingency accommodation, and Care4Calais

Hannah Marwood of Care4Calais talks to Syria Notes
13 AUGUST 2021
       
Image: The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Heathrow, one of the hotels used as contingency accommodation for asylum seekers during the Covid pandemic.

Back in February 2021, we spoke to Hannah Marwood, manager of the Access to Legal Aid Team at the UK charity Care4Calais, about how the charity’s work of supporting asylum seekers had adapted during the Covid pandemic.

The big change was that Care4Calais started to work much more in the UK, supporting large numbers of asylum seekers whom the Home Office were putting in contingency accommodation during the pandemic, as the usual flow of people through the dispersal accommodation system ground to a halt. Asylum seekers were being placed in hotels and hostels with minimal support, and notoriously were also housed in disused military camps.

Since this interview was conducted, one of those Ministry of Defence sites, Penally Camp in Wales, has been closed. But Napier Barracks in Kent is still in use, despite highly critical reports from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration as well as Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons, and a damning court judgment in a case brought by six asylum seekers against the Home Secretary.

This interview was conducted by Clara Connolly as part of an ongoing Syria Notes project looking at recent changes in UK asylum law and policy.

Clara Connolly: Let’s start by asking you to describe the origins of Care4Calais. When did it start, and why and by whom?

Hannah Marwood: It was started by our founder Clare Moseley in 2015. Up until last year we worked primarily in Northern France and Belgium. We provide direct aid in the form of clothes, food, hot drinks, mobile phones. Anything and everything they need to make their lives a little bit easier there. And then last year, we grew a lot in the UK.

Can you describe some of the earlier work from 2015 onward in Calais?

Calais is a point where hundreds of refugees stay on their way to the UK. They often end up sleeping rough in tents and camps across northern France and into Belgium as well. The environment in France is incredibly hostile to refugees. We’ve noted that the pace of evictions in the last year or so is ramping up. The police force there will remove them from their tents, and on some occasions they will cut their tents open so that they’re not able to be used the following night. There are reports of violence by the police as well.

So, the work that our volunteers do there is providing them with essential items in terms of tents, sleeping bags, warm clothes, shoes—any necessities that they might need. Some people that I’ve spoken to have stayed in northern France for a year before travelling across to the UK. Some people for a lot less than that.

Has your work changed since the Calais Jungle camp was abolished? It was at one time a very big and well organised camp.

You’re right. It had shops and faith rooms and a community there. However, that was abolished and now you end up with the refugees a lot more spread out, so they’re harder to access. The French government have been cutting down a lot of the wooded areas where they would set up their camps to make it much more difficult for them. There are evictions almost every day, where people are forced out of their tents. It’s very distressing for the people that live there.

A lot of the refugees staying there have a huge distrust in the French system. They quite often don’t want to have their fingerprints taken, because the UK is where they want to come and claim asylum.

Why is that, do you think?

For many reasons. Some people have family here that they want to join, others have English as a second language, and a lot of people who have reached the UK believe that the UK is a fairer system and their asylum claim will be heard here and they will be treated better. So, they do hold the UK on a pedestal of fairness.

We see a lot of nationalities, predominantly from countries such as Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq and Iran. More and more, we’re seeing Eritreans.

War-torn countries

Exactly, countries that have faced conflict for a number of years now.

Were you able to provide access to lawyers who could use the EU rules on family reunion?

There was a time where we put unaccompanied minors staying in and around the Calais region in touch with Duncan Lewis solicitors, and they were able to help them to travel to the UK in a safe manner.

You mentioned Belgium?

We do distributions in Belgium as well. Not as frequently as in Calais and Dunkirk, but our teams on the ground in Calais—we’ve got the warehouse there—would drive north to Belgium to do distributions. There are some really wonderful organisations in Belgium, so the distributions that we do in Belgium are less frequent than we would do in Calais and Dunkirk.

Care4Calais is predominantly a volunteer-based organisation. Volunteers go out to Calais and work in the warehouse sorting distributions that we’ve received from all across the UK. They decide what they’re going to distribute that day and get it out in teams. It has been tricky with COVID, and we had to ask that volunteers stay for longer than they would have before.

With Brexit and Covid, it became more and more difficult to get the goods across to Calais. It’s a tough environment to be sleeping in in tents, so getting warm clothes to people is important—coats, shoes. We have some amazing suppliers that we would purchase new items from such as underwear—it’s always nice to have fresh underwear!

A lot of the people who stay in Calais and Dunkirk are single men, so we do specify that when we’re doing a call out for general donations. There are, however, quite a few families with children, so occasionally we’re in need of children’s and women’s clothes as well.

There’s a few hundred people in the Calais area—it’s difficult to know because the camps are moved every couple of days. There are more in and around the Calais area than there are in Dunkirk. It’s quite tricky to know because of the scattered effect that happened since the Jungle was dismantled.

Links to Care4Calais

Website: care4calais.org
Facebook: @care4calais
Instagram: @care4calais
Twitter: @Care4Calais

You said that your work has changed, has moved more to the UK. Could you say something about that?

The biggest thing that has happened in the last year or so is that we’ve now got a much bigger operation in the UK. It was in response to the use of contingency accommodation by the Home Office, and their response to Covid.

Now we’ve got two branches of work in the UK: we’ve got the direct aid which is similar to what we do in Calais, and we have an Access to Legal Aid Team that we have set up, to link asylum seekers in the UK with legal representation.

We have now over 500 direct aid volunteers in the UK. Quite a lot of them have volunteered in Calais as well, so they know what we do, and how we do it.

Direct aid is visiting the people who are currently housed in hotels and barracks across the country in the contingency accommodation used by the Home Office and they help with distributions—so providing warm clothes. Befriending—that’s the main part of what we do—giving them a friendly face to talk to and feel like they’re not so alone. The people that we meet become very isolated in these accommodation options and their mental health declines. So, having somewhere that they can go to, and talk and feel like they’re not so alone is important. We would also do signposting: helping people get their kids to local schools, or to sign up for GPs, or dentists, anything they need to feel welcome in the UK.

What do you mean by contingency accommodation?

“Contingency accommodation” as the Home office calls it is initial accommodation: hotels and ministry of defence sites that are being used across the country to house asylum seekers. There is a big backlog in the processing of asylum claims, and because of Covid there is a need for accommodation quickly. So, asylum seekers were to be housed temporarily in hotels and ministry of defence sites. As time has gone on, it’s not looking so temporary, anymore. They are still in the hotel sites and the ministry of defence sites.

The hotels are predominantly in and around the London area. But they also range up to Leeds and Manchester, as well.

So, are you able to visit the hotels?

Initially we were able to visit people in the hotels. The mental health of people declines rapidly because in hotels they’re alone, they’re bewildered—they’ve just arrived. They’re very isolated. From what we have seen they have very little support, and really struggle in these accommodation options.

We like to do distributions off site, as well, because it gives them some reason to go out of the hotel and get out and have some fresh air. A lot of people we speak to are nervous about leaving the hotel. We spoke to one person in a hotel who hadn’t left it because he was worried about getting stopped by the police. And no-one had explained to him that that wouldn’t happen in the UK, and that he could go out and get some fresh air and go for a walk and that was fine. So, a lot of it is helping them understand where they are and what they are entitled to.

They have food included. There have been quite a few issues with the food. A lot of the time it lacks basic nutrition, it is the same thing quite regularly, and we’ve had reports that the food in some of the hotels has been making people quite ill.

What kind of hotels are they being put in?

Definitely not the Hilton. They are hotels across the country that are not being used because of Covid, a lot of them in various states of disrepair. We have had reports of mice infestations in some of the hotels, of cockroaches and bed bugs and other nasty situations. So not the five-star establishments, that is for sure.

And does anybody beside yourselves communicating with tell them what’s going to happen?

Migrant Help has a twenty-four-hour hotline that people can call. However, we have heard reports that they don’t explain things that well. There’s a lack of communication with the people in these hotels which is what really forces their mental health into decline. They feel left in these hotels for months now, and they haven’t had any communication as to what is happening with their asylum claim, or where they are going to go next. They have always been told that these options were temporary, but now, here we are, eight months down the line.

But do they support each other?

You get fifty to three hundred people in these hotels. It’s a lot of potentially vulnerable people to put in one place who have varying mental health issues, or previous trauma, so it can be quite tricky, but they are amazing and they do form these mini communities and look out for each other as best they can. However, you do often have a few people who haven’t been able to do that, they feel overwhelmed and scared and will stay in their rooms a lot of the time and they’re quite hard to access.

We will go to the hotels and set up distribution spaces or off site, using churches and community centres. We have volunteers there and people can come down and pick up what they need, but also have a conversation which is really important.

We have some volunteers who have second language skills. Google Translate—as silly as that sounds—it’s incredibly helpful when talking to people. And you’d be surprised how much of a conversation you can have with someone using very few words and hand gestures. It’s about showing them that someone cares.

You don’t have to have any particular language skills to volunteer with us. You just have to want to meet people, have conversations, and help. And then you get added to a local group to be informed of the local hotels—you have regular Zoom calls with the volunteer group and plan distributions. There’s a good network of volunteers. Some are more experienced than others and they are supportive of each other.

I saw a report of a distribution centre in Kings Cross, for example. Could you describe what goes on there?

There is one near to Kings Cross, yes. They’re all across the London area as well as other areas across the country. The general process is that you would find a space, set it up, do a call out for donations—the response that we have is amazing.

What kind of goods?

Similar to what we would ask for in Calais. So, warm winter clothes. A lot of the people that we meet have just the one set of clothes that they arrived in. Because they are provided three meals a day and accommodation, over the summer they had no funds at all on top of that, so they were unable to buy essentials such as clothes, a new pair of shoes. You’d meet people who had literally one change of clothes and flip flops on their feet. Now, they are entitled to eight pounds a week, but there are still people who are not receiving what they are entitled to, so they do need help getting essential items.

Phones are very important, first of all for telling their family back home that they are safe. It also gives them access to Google Translate, so that they can communicate, it gives them access to websites and apps where they can learn English or better their English. It also helps them to stay in touch with each other and with legal representation.

Is it difficult to get hold of asylum lawyers?

Our Access to Legal Aid Team works to link asylum seekers in the UK with legal representation who hold a legal aid contract with the government. There have been significant cuts to legal aid over the last few years, so there have been capacity issues with the immigration solicitors that we work with. That has been a struggle.

We’ve been operating our Access to Legal Aid Team for seven to eight months now, and we just hit over a thousand clients that we managed to find representation for.

That is impressive. I have noticed how much demand for each asylum lawyer there is, because the pool of free lawyers has shrunk.

We only refer to lawyers that have a legal aid contract. The people that we work with aren’t able to afford private solicitors, so they would need a lawyer with a legal aid contract.

The other form of contingency accommodation that you mentioned was army barracks.

The Home Office is using Ministry of Defence sites in the form of barracks across the country, in Napier, in Penally, and in Coltishall in Norfolk as well, although that the numbers there have dwindled so much that I don’t think it’s being used any more.

And then the Home Office had plans to house up to 200 asylum seekers in, essentially, a wasteland next to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removals Centre—a completely unacceptable accommodation option. They were planning on building Portakabins. I believe they did actually build some Portakabins, which now will no longer be used.

We were quite integral to a campaign against the use of Yarl’s Wood for housing asylum seekers. The campaign was joined by over 50 refugee organisations and charities across the UK, and there was also legal action taken by a local resident of Bedfordshire who is also a Care4Calais volunteer and a Stand Up to Racism volunteer, and that challenged the Home Office use of this site. And the Home Office pulled its plans to use Yarl’s Wood to house asylum seekers, so we are happy and proud that happened.

Have you figured out who get sent to Barracks and who gets sent to hotels?

I know the people that are sent to the barracks are men. They will not put women and children in the barracks, and the line is that they are people whose case files suggest that they have no history of vulnerability. However, from what we have seen, this is not true. They have been trafficking victims, torture victims—horrific. And these camps have had a re-traumatising effect on them. So these people should not be in the camps.

Have they all come by boat?

Many of them have, yes. I know a couple that haven’t, but predominantly they are people that have crossed the channel over the summer in 2020.

So, would you say that it is meant to deter?

Yes. I believe that the Equality Impact Assessment document that was released last week suggests that the camps are an accommodation option so as not to look like the government are treating asylum seekers as they would a British person. It’s disappointing.

We have had a significant presence in Napier. Direct aid volunteers have been providing support since it opened in September, and our Access to Legal Aid Team have managed to sign people up with solicitors. The use of the barracks is completely unacceptable. We speak to clients who are trafficking victims, victims of modern slavery. They have past experience of imprisonment, torture, they have many vulnerabilities caused by the reason they were forced to flee their countries, so housing them in a military setting with 24 hour security and barbed wire round the fences is extremely re-traumatising for them. They have been unable to sleep because of nightmares and flashbacks and being housed in rooms with up to 14 people with varying mental health concerns which are spiralling because of their recent environment. It’s become a disaster.

There was a massive Covid outbreak in January there, like everybody said there would be. That sort of site was never going to be appropriate to be able to prevent and manage a Covid outbreak. They have one nurse on site, who apparently is able to refer people to a local GP, but we’re not sure how often this has been happening. There’s no mental health provision. And they also end up with physical health issues in the form of Covid symptoms and haven’t had any support. They’re incredibly frightened.

We have been working with some amazing public law solicitors to move people out. We’ve done about seventy five transfer requests for people to be moved out for varying reasons, including the fact they were victims of trafficking torture, imprisonment, physical health issues, mental health issues.

So, you say, if any of the inmates can access to a lawyer that means that they are likely to be able to be moved out. Is that right?

Yes we have been quite successful with the transfer requests that we have made.

We heard in an interview with Kent Refugee Action Network that lawyers were turning up at the camp and were being turned away.

We’ve heard that as well. Solicitors who turned up at the camp to take clients on and help them with their asylum claim were being turned away. Denying them access to legal representation is awful.

We have also seen that direct aid volunteers initially were allowed access to the site, but in recent months have been turned away as well. There seems to be gatekeeping of the site which is quite concerning.


There’s an obvious reason why people wouldn’t be allowed in if there’s a Covid pandemic raging inside.

Yes, of course, but prior to that, we were being turned away. There was a period as well when our volunteers were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement to get access to the sites, which was underpinned by the Official Secrets Act. We obviously weren’t able to sign this document. It would stop us from alerting anyone to any adverse conditions inside the camp, which is what our role is.

The direct aid team provide clothing and mobile phones where someone has not had a phone, or they’ve had their phone confiscated on arrival in Dover.

I believe the reason is that they’re looking for evidence of smuggling, and how they got to the UK. However, we found that there was a long delay in the Home Office returning people’s belongings, so we had a couple of clients from around the April, May, June time who have only just started getting their phones back, since we have started working with a couple of law firms.

The solicitors that help with the return of people’s phones are public law solicitors, so separate from their asylum solicitor. We work with public law solicitors to challenge things like the phone confiscations and the appropriateness of individuals being housed in the barracks.

The individuals that we were working with were at immediate risk. They were in poor mental health, had suicidal thoughts, and were really struggling. We decided to work in the best interests of the individual and to do a transfer request for them as quickly as possible.

Our team would make a referral for an individual to a solicitor and then book an appointment for them. During lockdown, this is quite often done remotely, or over Zoom, so we would help the asylum seeker download Zoom and get the hang of it, ensure that the first appointment went well, and then most of it is done over the phone.

For referrals we have a WhatsApp number that people can contact. We have one number that comes through to our team, so it is all done directly.

The volunteers on our Access to Legal Aid Team are not legally trained—they act as a referral mechanism. We help to manage expectations potentially of both sides, and make sure that all of their documents are there. It all gets sent through to the lawyer in a good amount of time, and the appointment happens. We’ve got just over thirty volunteers at the moment—they are amazing and have become very knowledgeable.

Sometimes you might get a panicked message from a client. They’ve received some paperwork from the Home Office and it’s all in English, and they don’t have a clue what it says. And you are able to help with the translation. If it is something worrying, then send it through to the lawyer, so they can check it out.


And so, what would you like to see happen, throughout 2021?

I would like to see our government form a more welcoming stance towards asylum seekers. The current situation is not good for anybody, especially not for people who have fled conflict and war and persecution. I would like them to address the backlog in asylum claims, so that the use of such accommodation is not necessary. I would like to see them permit asylum seekers to work and contribute to our communities. The people that I meet are intelligent people, and they are motivated to contribute to the country that is offering refuge. Currently, the way our government policies are, they are not permitted to do that. If they were able to work, then they would be able to contribute to taxes and integrate much better.

Do you think Brexit has made a difference in that the Home Office is aware it can’t send people back through the European rules since they cut themselves off from European regulations?

I think that Brexit and the removal of the Dublin regulations had a massive effect on government policy towards refugees. There was a massive rush at the back end of 2020 to remove a lot of asylum seekers under the Dublin regulations. We had 120 clients who were in immigration removal centres. We were able to find them legal representation, and I would say 90 to 95% of those people have now been released because the lawyers that we linked them with were able to make valid legal reasons why they should not have been removed at that time.

We now have these new regulations where the Home Office has the ability to deem claims inadmissible in the UK if there is evidence that they have travelled through other countries.

Have you seen any examples of that yet?

We have seen some clients at the early stages of that process, yes. It’s incredibly concerning that the UK is not offering refuge to people and will attempt to deem their claim inadmissible.

I think that there is a good argument that they are breaking international law, and I am sure that there are a lot of immigration solicitors out there who will be challenging this.

Well it sounds like you have been a very flexible organisation. You’ve been able to change the kind of support you offer depending on the circumstances.

It’s all snowballed quite rapidly. Ideally, we wouldn’t have to do the work that we do, but it’s exciting how quickly we’ve been able to grow and help a lot of people.

We’ve got over 500 volunteers doing the direct aid work, over 30 doing the Access to Legal Aid Team. We would not be able to operate at all without them. And our previous experience in Calais and Dunkirk has meant that we understand distributions and direct aid, so its been really good to have a template to work off in terms of supporting the hotels and the barracks.

The legal aid team is new. That’s definitely been a learning curve, but one that I think we’ve managed well. We’ve developed really good relationships with solicitors across the country so they will come to us, and we will go to them and it means that we’re able to also assist on this larger litigation project, as well.


Transcription by Zoë Ranson. Illustration by Peggy Jacobs Strom.
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Fortress UK

5 MARCH 2021


For Spring 2021, we are publishing a series of articles and interviews on recent changes in UK asylum policy and law.

We begin with the basics of asylum law, explained by Clara Connolly.

We talk to Bridget Chapman of Kent Refugee Action Network, a charity that for the past eighteen years has worked to help asylum seekers arriving in southeast England. KRAN’s work has become much more difficult in recent months since the UK Government started using a former army camp to accommodate asylum seekers.

In ‘How to seek asylum in the UK’, we explain the process of applying for asylum as simply as we can.

And we talk to Sonia Lenegan of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association about what immigration lawyers do, and how they’ve dealt with the UK Government’s recent ‘activist lawyers’ rhetoric.

We will have more in the coming weeks, talking to asylum seekers who have been in the camps, as well as to activists, charities, and lawyers.

Image: The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Heathrow, one of the hotels used as contingency accommodation during the Covid pandemic. See our interview with Hannah Marwood of Care4Calais for more.

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Asylum law made easy

By Clara Connolly
5 MARCH 2021
Around the world, 148 countries have signed up to the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951, as amended in 1967.
Read more »
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Napier Barracks: worse than prison

Bridget Chapman of Kent Refugee Action Network talks to Syria Notes
4 MARCH 2021
Kent Refugee Action Network, or KRAN for short, is a registered charity that for the past eighteen years has worked to help asylum seekers arriving in southeast England. The county of Kent includes Dover, the main UK port for cross-channel traffic from France. It’s also where the Channel Tunnel emerges. As a result, Kent has been the point of arrival for many of the people who have come to the UK seeking asylum.

We talked to Bridget Chapman about KRAN’s work, which has become much more difficult in recent months since the UK Government started using a former army camp to accommodate asylum seekers.

Read more »
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How to seek asylum in the UK

By Clara Connolly
4 MARCH 2021

If you needed asylum, would you know what to do? The Home Office has published guidance in various languages on how to claim asylum in the UK. Here we try to explain the process as simply as we can.

Read more »
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When the best lawyers are free

Sonia Lenegan of the ILPA talks to Syria Notes
4 MARCH 2021

Sonia Lenegan is legal director of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. Founded in 1984, the majority of ILPA members are barristers, solicitors and advocates practising in all areas of immigration, asylum, and nationality law.

For Syria Notes, Clara Connolly talked to Sonia Lenegan about activist lawyers, army camps, and asylum rules after Brexit.

Read more »