Really? This is the narrative the home office has taken on the deportation of Jamaican’s who have committed crimes.

Proud and boastful, Priti Patel gloats on her amazing performance whilst I sit here and try to work out how someone, never mind a government official, can call deporting people to a foreign country that some of them haven’t seen for over a decade an achievement.

Since the Covid-19 restrictions have been put in place the majority of the public and the government have been addressing the idea of getting back to normality. Therefore, this has involved trying to reduce restrictions in time for Christmas. However, the Home Office continue to promote this message of future normality, as a government department, whilst sending fathers and sons to a foreign country where their child will lose communication with their parents and thus have damaging impacts for both the remaining children in the UK and the Jamaican’s removed from their home. Thus, completely contradicting this idea of bringing back normality to UK homes.

Maybe my bias is driving my judgement, as both sides of my family are from the Caribbean (Jamaica and St Kitt’s to be specific). However, it shocks me to see that sending back people who have already served their sentence and thus have been allowed to leave prison as they are deemed as safe enough to re-enter society are now being taken out of the country entirely. Sending them back in a bid to make society more “secure” makes no apparent sense considering they have already served their punishment and if they were born in Britain they would be freely allowed to mingle with the rest of the public.

I regret to say this but I do believe Priti Patel is correct in saying that the Windrush and the Jamaican deportations are two different cases. But I do not agree with Patel’s judgement for saying so. They are different cases because, the Windrush Scandal targeted the more vulnerable older generation who had no awareness of how to use the law to help them out of the mess the Home Office created. Whereas, the reasoning for the deportation of Jamaican’s is bolstered by the fact that they have committed crimes. However, as a country I may be bold to make the assumption but I believe we would be outraged if Commonwealth countries tried to send back individuals Britain once deported to their countries.

The fact that Patel believes that the Windrush Scandal and the Jamaican deportation’s differences justifies deportation is absurd! Both cases deserve to be looked at with the same fair judgement. The Jamaican’s who have been deported and those who are fighting deportation may be their families main income earner and thus deporting people who have served time for a crime they committed years ago does not pose a significant economical benefit. This can be justified by the fact that if deporting the Jamaican’s ensures that we as a country can be proud and remain strong as a nation it means we just completely ignored the young child without a father figure growing up in the inner-city where knife crime is prevalent and now has no role model to deter them from the consequences of growing in a disadvantaged area. The mother who just lost her partner now has to work twice as hard to compensate for the fact the Home Office once again refused to acknowledge significant retraining and re-education of employees needs to take place.

If these Jamaican’s are ex convicts and hold British citizenship we should be providing them with the same treatment as other British citizens who have committed crimes and do not have to worry about being sent off to a country 4000 miles away.

~Akirha Skeete