Department drops efforts to return Tony Hall to Barbados, a country he left at 12 and where he has no living relatives
The Home Office has lifted a deportation order handed to a 62-year-old man who has lived in Britain for 50 years after criticism of the department’s attempts to remove him to Barbados, a country he left as a child.
The Home Office wrote to Tony Hall on Tuesday to inform him that his deportation order had been revoked. His case had been highlighted in the Guardian a day earlier.
Hall had repeatedly tried to get the deportation order lifted, arguing that as the child of parents who emigrated to the Britain as part of the Windrush generation, he had the right to remain in the UK. He has no surviving relatives in Barbados and has not visited the country since arriving in London aged 12 to join his parents and five older sisters in 1976.
The Home Office had previously stated that he was liable for deportation because of a 2001 conviction for conspiracy to rob and having a firearm with intent. Police stopped Hall and his co-defendants before the robbery was committed. Hall spent eight years in prison.
Officials have been attempting to deport him since the end of his sentence in 2009. As a result of his precarious immigration status, he has been prohibited from working, renting somewhere to live, receiving benefits or receiving full access to NHS treatment.
Hall had argued that he should not continue to be punished as a result of a crime committed 25 years ago, and for which he had served prison time. The Home Office put him on a flight to Barbados in January 2010 in an attempt to deport him to the country of his birth, but he was returned to London on the same plane, arriving the next day. Officials in Barbados appear to have been unwilling to issue him with papers to enter because of the length of time he had been in the UK.
His lawyer, Naga Kandiah at MTC Solicitors, welcomed the decision but said: “The historical injustice at the heart of this case remains unresolved. For over 17 years, our client has endured fear, detention, relentless uncertainty, exclusion from work and housing, and ultimately destitution.
“The Home Office may revoke a deportation order, but it cannot give our client back 17 years of his life.”
Hall said the protracted period of limbo had been very difficult, and that he was relieved that he now had “the chance to live in the country I call home without fear”.
The Home Office indicated that the timing of the decision to lift the deportation was coincidental.
Clive Foster, the Windrush commissioner, the independent advocate for victims and families affected by the scandal, also intervened with the Home Office, arguing that a compassionate approach should be taken in Hall’s case.
Fiona Bawdon, the author of Will I Always Be British? , a recent study of people with precarious immigration status, said: “Either the government wants to do right by all of those it harmed or it doesn’t. What ministers fail to realise is that each time they treat someone in the way they treated Tony Hall, other Windrush victims – even those who’ve now had their citizenship confirmed – feel as if they could still be at risk, as if they are not really seen as British and this could be taken away from them again.”