The Guardian reports on the case of Paulette Wilson, who had been in Britain for 50 years when she received a letter informing her that she was an illegal immigrant and was going to be removed and sent back to Jamaica, the country she left when she was 10 and has never visited since:

Last month, she spent a week at Yarl’s Wood detention centre before being sent to the immigration removal centre at Heathrow, where detainees are taken just before they are flown out of the country. [. . .] The experience of being detained and threatened with deportation to a country she has no links with has been profoundly upsetting for Paulette, a grandmother and former cook, who has paid national insurance contributions for 34 years and can prove a long history of working and paying taxes in this country.

Paulette, 61, arrived in the UK in 1968, went to primary and secondary school in Britain, raised her daughter, Natalie, here and has helped to bring up her granddaughter. For a while, she worked in the House of Commons restaurant overlooking the Thames, serving meals to MPs and parliamentary security staff. More recently, she has volunteered at her local church, making weekly meals for homeless people.

She has been left furious and distraught by this sudden Home Office decision to categorise her as an illegal immigrant. The week of detention in Yarl’s Wood was the worst experience of her life.

“I felt like I didn’t exist. I wondered what was going to happen to me. All I did was cry, thinking of my daughter and granddaughter; thinking that I wasn’t going to see them again,” she says while sitting in Natalie’s flat in Wolverhampton. She was taken from the Home Office reporting centre in Solihull, Birmingham, in a secure van and told she was going to be sent out of the country. “I couldn’t eat or sleep; still now I can’t eat and sleep properly.”

When staff told her after she had spent a week in Yarl’s Wood that they were going to take her to the removal centre, she was allowed to call Natalie; she screamed in terror down the phone. “I was panicking because that evening they took away a lady. I watched her crying and being taken away. It was very scary,” she says.

Paulette’s solicitor, Jim Wilson, is working to persuade Home Office staff that Paulette has a legal right to stay in the UK because she moved here before the 1973 Immigration Act gave people who had already settled in Britain indefinite leave to remain. Although the decision to detain and remove her is extremely unusual, there is evidence that a large number of people who came legally to the UK in the 60s have found themselves wrongly caught up in the “hostile environment” Theresa May said she wanted to create for illegal immigrants in 2012.

Migrant rights charities around the country are increasingly coming across people who have been living here for 50 or more years – often people from the Commonwealth – who came to the UK when there was no need to apply formally for leave to remain. They have only recently encountered problems because they have no documents to prove their right to be here. (Newer arrivals, who came after immigration laws became tougher and less welcoming, are less likely to find themselves in Paulette’s situation.)

[. . .] When she was 10, Paulette’s mother put her on a plane to the UK, to live with her grandfather, a factory worker, and her grandmother, a care worker. Her mother, who she never saw again, sent her here for a better life and, on the whole, Paulette has been happy here. She never travelled back to Jamaica and never applied for a passport. She never gave a thought to her immigration status. [. . .]

Her housing benefit and sickness benefits were stopped immediately, leaving her homeless. For two years, Natalie has been supporting her financially and a friend has let her stay in his flat. She was told to report monthly to the Home Office.

Natalie [her daughter] and her case worker, Daniel Ashwell, at the Refugee and Migrant Centre in Wolverhampton have gathered documents proving that she has been in the country for 50 years. [. . .] Her case worker believes there has been some bureaucratic confusion on the part of the Home Office, and a lack of understanding among junior staff about the law making it clear that Paulette has the right to remain.

“They have deprived her of everything,” Natalie says, detailing how her mother has been near destitution for the past two years. [. . .] Paulette’s MP, Labour’s Emma Reynolds, says: “It is really shocking that the Home Office is detaining a woman in her 60s who has been here for 50 years. It seems to me that Paulette Wilson was detained wrongly and I am seeking clarification from the Home Office. My understanding is that she is here legally.”

Her solicitor, Jim Wilson, who volunteers legal support to the Refugee and Migrant Centre, says he knows of a number of people in a similar situation, but no one else who had been detained and threatened with removal.

[Detail of “Paulette Wilson … the week of detention in Yarl’s Wood was the worst experience of her life.” Photograph: Fabio De Paola for the Guardian.]

For full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/28/i-cant-eat-hr-sleep-the-grandmother-threatened-with-deportation-after-50-years-in-britain