A husband and wife face enforced separation because the Home Office wants to put him on a deportation flight to Pakistan on Tuesday, leaving his wife in the UK.
Labour has pledged to increase deportations, and since taking office, has removed more than 10,000 people – a mix of voluntary returnees, those denied asylum and people with criminal convictions. There has not been a deportation charter flight to Pakistan since February 2020, with three subsequent deportation charter flights to Pakistan in 2020 and 2021 cancelled by the Home Office.
The couple, both 37, have been together for 14 years in the UK where they met. They are fearful of being publicly identified as they say if the husband is forced on to a plane on Tuesday he would have to go into hiding, as he fled an arranged marriage in Pakistan and his intended fiancee then killed herself.
They say that they will be at risk from both the man’s and the fiancee’s family if one or both of them is returned to Pakistan, their home country. The couple both claimed asylum on the basis of being at risk because of the man fleeing the arranged marriage but their claim has been refused by the Home Office. The wife is a dependant on her husband’s asylum claim.
The man was arrested by officials on 14 November when he went to a routine reporting session at a Home Office centre. Since then he has been detained at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire where the Home Office has different wings to detain men and women.
“I have not been able to see my husband since he was arrested,” his wife told the Guardian. “I am in Home Office asylum accommodation and have no money to travel and no ID to show the guards at Yarl’s Wood. If he is deported tomorrow I don’t know when I will see him again. If I can’t be with my husband I am thinking about killing myself here in the UK although suicide is prohibited in our religion.
“We have not committed any crimes, we just want to be together. My husband ran away from an arranged marriage and we married for love. My husband has mental health problems and I have many physical health problems including diabetes.
“A few months ago Home Office asked us to agree to a voluntary return to Pakistan. Although we believed our lives would be at risk we agreed to go because we thought we had no other choice. I asked if the return could be delayed until I had completed some medical treatment. But now they are taking my husband and leaving me here.”
A member of Solidarity Detainee Support, an organisation that is supporting some detainees due to fly to Pakistan on Tuesday, said: “Every single person we’re supporting is very worried, has family friends or dependants here in the UK and hasn’t had enough time to get proper legal representation to challenge their deportations.”
The Home Office also came under fire at a session of the public accounts committee on Monday afternoon where a crossparty group of MPs scrutinised flaws in the failed purchase of an asbestos-contaminated former prison site in Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex for £15.4m to accommodate asylum seekers.
Sir Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, told the committee that with hindsight things would have been done differently. It was confirmed that the Home Office has now decided to sell the site without any asylum seekers having been accommodated there or alternatively to offer it to another government department.
He said that there is now a different asylum accommodation strategy in place with 800 new, smaller accommodation sites in the pipeline, adding that “one thousand lessons have been learned in totality” from things that the Home Office did wrong.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is longstanding government policy that we do not comment on individual cases. Due to operational sensitivities, we will not be commenting on operational details, including location, of any potential return flights.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
