It could happen to any one of us who happens not to look exactly like every pig-ignorant, crayon sucker of a prison service meathead thinks they ought to, or who has the audacity to have a funny foreign name.
But hey, look on the bright side, at least he wasn’t banged up indefinitely on terror charges; he should be grateful, shouldn’t he?
British Asian faced deportation threat
· Officials believed jailed student was Pakistani
· Detention meant he could not produce documentsJeevan Vasagar
Thursday March 1, 2007
The GuardianA British Asian was held in a detention centre for nearly two months and threatened with deportation to Pakistan because Home Office officials believed he was a foreigner.
Immigration officials assumed that Sabbir Ahmed, who speaks with a Lancashire accent, was Pakistani despite the fact that he was born in Blackburn and has a British passport. His parents come from India but also have British citizenship.
Mr Ahmed, 34, an accountancy student at the University of Leicester, had finished serving a two-month prison sentence for driving while disqualified when he was identified as a foreign national and held for deportation. His case followed a furore over the failure to deport foreign prisoners which cost home secretary Charles Clarke his job last summer.
Mr Ahmed said: “It was so frustrating, it just felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall. I was screaming my innocence to anyone who would listen and they were trying to deport me to a country where I’ve got no ties.”
He was asked to provide documents proving his nationality but was unable to do so because his passport was at his flat in east London and he could not leave Haslar detention centre in Gosport, Hampshire. He was only freed after campaigners from Haslar visitors’ group got access to his flat to recover his documents, and photocopies were shown to a judge at an appeal hearing against the deportation.
“I’ve never been to Pakistan,” he said in an interview with the Portsmouth News. “But no matter how much I protested I was innocent, that didn’t matter.”
[…]
Mr Ahmed’s case is not an isolated one. A report last year on foreign prisoners by Anne Owers, chief inspector of prisons, found regular failings in establishing the nationality of prisoners. In one case an inspection team which interviewed 12 juvenile prisoners identified as foreign found that five of them were British. It quoted one prisoners’ representative as saying: “If you are black officers assume you are a foreign national.”
Seriously, any Briton who feels this could happen to them or someone close to them (and after seeing more and more stories like this pop up, it seems less and less unlikely) would do well to download, read and keep handy the Immigration Law Practitioner’s Group Best Practice Guide To Challenging Immigration Detention, just in case.
