COP26 in pictures

A decade of resistance

Migrant justice groups are marking ten years of resistance to the government’s hostile environment policies by vowing to continue the fight.

When Theresa May stood up in the House of Commons in April and criticised the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda on the grounds of “legality, practicality and efficacy”, it was a remarkable end to a spiral of anti-migrant hostility she had herself sparked as home secretary in 2012. Ever since she announced her intention “to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, people across the country – from NHS workers to teachers, employers to bank workers – have been pressured into acting as border guards.

But from outrage at the Windrush scandal which followed, to successive legal challenges to the policy, which was found to be in breach of equalities law, as well as protests, campaigns and petitions, the hostile environment has been resisted every step of the way. A week of action in June, organised by the Solidarity Knows No Borders network, will continue the struggle.

For more info see: firmcharter.org.uk/week-of-action

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1. Campaigners outside the Department for Education in 2017 call for a boycott of the school census used to build lists of foreign children attending schools in the UK. In June 2018 the government announced the data would no longer be sought.

© Mark Kerrison/Alamy Live News

2. Londoner Marcia Fredericks outside the Home Office in April 2018. She was refused cancer treatment by the NHS due to a mix-up over her date of birth, even though she is a British citizen.

© Andy Rain/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

3. Campaigners from Docs Not Cops protest outside St Thomas’s Hospital in 2017 against the government’s hostile environment measures requiring NHS trusts to demand patients’ immigration status before giving treatment.

© Mark Kerrison/Alamy Live News

4. Protestors in Pollokshields, Glasgow, block an immigration enforcement van after an attempted raid was carried out in May 2021. After a long stand-off, two men who had been detained were released.

© Ewan Bootman/NurPhoto/Shutterstock