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Attempted removal of Yarlswood woman; BBC report on destitution

Independent: 9.4.2018 – Opelo Kgari: Government thwarted in second bid to deport woman brought to UK from Botswana

Exclusive: Kgari, who spoke to The Independent about life in Yarl’s Wood and took a leading role in hunger strike by detainees, avoids Home Office efforts to deport her as lawyers condemn ‘positively inhumane removal regime’

A second attempt by the Home Office to deport a woman who came to the UK from Botswana when she was 13 years old has been thwarted.

Opelo Kgari, 27, who spoke out to The Independent about the conditions in Yarl’s Wood and took a leading role in the hunger strike by detainees, was put in a van to Heathrow on Monday afternoon to be placed on a removal flight to Botswana. She was told she couldn’t meet anyone to say goodbye.

Her mother, Florence, was also served with a deportation notice on Monday, but her solicitor got an injunction against her removal on the grounds that she is accepted to be a victim of torture and gender-based violence, meaning her deportation was quickly halted.

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BBC: 9.4.2018 – Destitute: UK asylum seekers’ struggle to survive

Charities in the UK are seeing a surge in demand for emergency financial aid, to provide for basic needs of asylum seekers who are no longer entitled to government support. So why are more and more people needing to reach out for help? Tim Smith reports..

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Guardian: Young asylum seekers ‘face blanket study ban’

Concern at numbers of young refugees being excluded from education

 The Home Office UK Visas & Immigration office at Croydon, London. New immigration rules came into effect in January 2018. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Young asylum seekers who arrived in the UK as children are being banned from study “as a matter of course” according to campaigners, despite government assurances there would be no “blanket ban” on education.

From January 2018, legal changes mean that anyone claiming asylum is considered to be on “immigration bail” – restrictions that the Home Office applies to asylum seekers until their application to remain in the UK is decided. The restrictions were previously limited to not working, living at a specified address, or reporting to the police or Home Office.

Yet “significant numbers” of young refugees have been told in the last few weeks that they are also not allowed to study – just weeks before some had been due to take important exams in some cases. Some asylum seekers have only discovered they are under a study ban after charity workers examined their new paperwork and noticed that a box had been ticked.