The Rwandan government has barred Clementine de Montjoye, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, from entering the country, prompting accusations that officials are seeking to dodge independent scrutiny just weeks before the UK government is due to send asylum seekers there for the first time.
Home Office officials fear the number of migrants deported on the first Rwanda flight could be in single figures because of legal challenges.
The concerns are believed to be behind moves to expand the scheme to include ALL failed asylum seekers on top of the initial cohort of 5,700 migrants so far earmarked for deportation.
Given Rwanda only has room for a few hundred currently, this is arrant nonsense and performative cruelty.
#Disconnection#CellPhones#Migrants#AsylumSeekers: "This article investigates online connection and disconnection practices among migrants and asylum seekers. It draws from an ethnography of three Sicilian reception centres that hosted migrants and asylum seekers between September and November 2020. We show how migrants, driven by different migratory motivations, enact different mobile connection and disconnection practices. We argue that these are characterised by the different affective meanings that migrants and asylum seekers attach to mobile connection and disconnection and by the different value they place on the public and private dimensions of their lives. By offering a multifaceted portrait of the mobile connection and disconnection practices of different categories of migrants, this article also contributes to: (1) media and migration studies, by showing that there are substantial differences in online connection practices and smartphone use between asylum seekers and migrants and (2) to disconnection studies, by highlighting the nuances that exist within disconnection practices among non-privileged social groups, such as migrants and asylum seekers. We show that they cannot afford to practise typically Western, urban and elitist forms of disconnection; however, they too are able to practise specific forms of disconnection, paradoxically afforded by staying connected. The article aims to contextualise and situate disconnection studies within different social, political, cultural and geographic contexts." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241249371
Graham King, an Essex businessman who won government contracts paying his firm £3.5m a day for transporting and accommodating asylum seekers has been named among the 350 richest people in the UK.
The Home Office is dealing with growing fallout as asylum seekers go into hiding or flee across the border to Ireland.
Predictable and ineffective:
"I was an asylum seeker in 2020 when the Home Office was trying to deport as many asylum seekers as possible to European countries they had passed through before Brexit started. Some asylum seekers went into hiding then & I can see that it is happening again because of Rwanda”
Decent article on the climate of fear produced by the disgusting Home Office Rwanda deportation detentions. Of course, the rightwing media is cockahoop.
The FDA, the union for senior civil servants, has launched a legal challenge against Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan over moves to force officials to break international law to carry out deportations.
They could be ordered by ministers to ignore European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) injunctions to carry out deportations, but have a duty under the Civil Service code to abide by the law.
MITIE, who run over 50% of the Government’s detention centres, have an annual turnover of over £4 billion. And they are set to profit from the misery inflicted on people seeking asylum in the UK through the Government’s brutal Rwanda plan
Below is the link to email MITIE and let them know what you think about their participation in this brutal Rwanda plan | Care4Calais
I have been following #UKPolitics for more years than I care to mention but this #Rwanda scheme is, by far, one of the worst things that my government has embarked upon.
@patrickhadfield He was a client of a Scottish lawyer. By removing him from Scotland, that relationship was broken. Having said that, his MP managed to find out where he was and has notified a suitable, legal organisation to assist him
The takeaway here is the Home Office is taking #asylumseekers out of Scotland in a clandestine way because the legal status of these people is high there