Protesters Picket UK Home Office Over Windrush Immigrant Scandal

LONDON (Sputnik) - Protesters in the United Kingdom have been picketing the Home Office two days in a row, running in defiance of plans to continue expelling immigrants of the so-called Windrush generation, a Sputnik correspondent reported on Tuesday.

Former UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd stepped down on Monday amid Windrush scandal concerning the mistreatment of long-term UK residents. Rudd admitted she had "inadvertently misled" the Parliament over immigrant removal targets believed to be in use by her own immigration officers. Both Rudd and Prime Minister Theresa May have been heavily criticized for their "hostile environment" policy toward immigrants.

According to Karen Doyle, a spokesperson for the Movement for Justice (MFJ), the demonstrators feared that the practice of deportations might continue unless the government made amendments to the existing immigration laws.

"These deportations are going to keep happening, because the way the law is framed at the moment is by defining the Windrush generation solely by the Immigration Act of 1971, which is an explicitly racist piece of legislation intended to stop coloured people coming into the UK… These measures essentially criminalized the descendants of the Windrush generation, so what we're saying is that the inequality and discrimination in that law needs to be changed," Doyle told Sputnik.

Despite government apologies and assurances to the contrary over the ongoing Windrush scandal, several UK residents were believed to have been subject to threats of deportation back to Jamaica, a Commonwealth nation, over their legal status. Yvonne Smith, a 63-year-old woman who has only recently been released from Yarl's Wood detention center, was originally told she faced deportation alongside an unknown number of fellow detainees.

"What's sparked this is the threat to deport two Jamaican grandmothers from Yarl's Wood [detention center] and so really we're protesting against the whole process of charter flights, but also the whole Windrush crisis and the associated indignities and injustices that people have been subjected to under this immigration system… In reality that only way to grant justice to this whole community of people that have been drawn into this is an amnesty," Doyle said.

Smith, whose father arrived in the United Kingdom as part of the original Windrush generation in 1957, came to Britain two decades ago, having lived in Birmingham prior to being detained. Despite having no remaining family in Jamaica, the woman was informed she had "no legal basis" to remain in the United Kingdom, an ultimatum believed to have been delivered on the very same day as May apologized to Commonwealth leaders over her government's treatment of the Windrush generation.