When the Home Office comes for you at your daughter’s wedding
On Friday, as her daughter was about to be married in Haringey town hall, about 15 immigration officers and a handful of regular police burst into the building and detained Isabella Acevedo.
It's a depressing ending to a depressing story. Acevedo was once the cleaner of former Home Office minister Mark Harper. Harper was forcing through a draconian bill upping the sanctions on employers who hired people without checking their papers when he realised he might be included in that category himself. He could not find the papers he had once seen which showed her right to work, so he informed the prime minister of the situation and resigned.
Harper, who oversaw the 'Go Home' van campaign at the Home Office, was feted as a man of honour and principle. He was reappointed to government as a junior minister at the DWP last week. His cleaner was left to the dogs. If referred to at all by political commentators it was as "an illegal".
Immigration enforcement finally came for her on Friday afternoon. According to Trenton Oldfield, who was attending the wedding, the burly-looking agents in black shirts burst into the town hall just before the ceremony. They took away Acevedo and her brother. The bride and groom were questioned and told the ceremony could not go ahead due to discrepancies in their paperwork. Registrars later said the paper work was perfectly satisfactory and proceeded with the ceremony, albeit without the mother in attendance. Oldfield tried to film the immigration officers but they roughly stopped him.
"If you film anything we will seize your phone to use as evidence, do you understand that?" the officer said. Oldfield asked under what law that requirement was made, before the officer reached for the phone to stop him physically.
Acevedo woke up this morning after her third night at Yarlswood detention centre. She is due to be deported on Thursday evening on BA Flight 247. On Wednesday, protestors will gather outside Harper's apartment, where Acevedo cleaned. There'll be another protest at Heathrow Terminal 5 at 19:00 BST on Thursday.
Some have tried to justify the operation by suggesting Acevedo had gone mafioso – that the only time to catch her was at a wedding where she was sure to be present. But the real picture is more troubling.
Why the overkill of 15 immigration officers and a handful of police? Why the gruff, aggressive manner? Why try to stop the wedding itself by wrongly claiming the papers were not in order? Why the refusal to let someone film what was going on?
This bears all the hallmarks of a revenge operation, an attempt to punish Acevedo for embarrassing a minister. Her daughter will always remember that scene when she looks back on her wedding day.
Even a few years ago such an operation would have been unthinkable. Officers adopted a more consensual, nuanced approach. They wold not have targeted a wedding unless they were convinced it was a sham marriage. The operation would not have been timed to maximise the anguish of the target.
This is part of a worrying trend in immigration enforcement, typified by the Go Home vans, aggressive and large-scale raids on workplaces and the placing of immigration officers at London tube stations last summer. Worryingly, it seems that as standards slip in the processing of immigration claims and the asylum backlog, the Home Office is making up for it with an increasingly militarised and bullying enforcement operation more reminiscent of a South American dictatorship than a leading western democracy.
Although the data is extremely limited, there's some evidence from focus groups that the public don't even like these tactics. Those who have sat in on them say people clearly want firm enforcement of the rules, but are uncomfortable with very heavy-handed methods. The booting down of doors and dawn raids are accepted where people feel authorities have no other option, but their non-necessary use is frowned on. You could see Nigel Farage sensing that British discomfort with the 'optics' of such operations when he came out against the 'Go Home' vans.
They are masking their failure to clean up the system with heavy-handed enforcement elsewhere. There are ways to do these things. And this most certainly is not it.
