Arresting Aram, Craig Barnett

Craig Barnett — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:21:55 +0000

When the doorbell rang at 6am Kate, my wife, went to answer it while I stayed upstairs with the children. Even before she got to the door she knew it was Immigration. There were four immigration officers and two policemen, come for our friend Aram, who had been living with us for several months. He had applied for refugee status in the UK and been refused, so he was homeless and couldn't work or claim any State support.

Aram came to us through the drop-in centre at Asylum Link Merseyside, and had become almost part of the family. He was a particular favourite of our two year old daughter Moya, who loved to ‘help' him with the gardening and cooking. Aram taught her games and songs in Armenian, and Moya would wish him good night with ‘Bar e Gisha'.

Aram was allowed to use the toilet, but had to keep the door open while the immigration officers stood outside the bathroom. Then they put him in the back of their van and he was gone. I went back to check on the children, who thankfully had slept through it.

He spent the next four months in detention centres. We spoke to him on the phone and he was constantly expecting to be deported. Then one day we had a call. "Craig, it's Aram. They've let me out. Can I come home?" So he came back and lived with us for about a year altogether. It turned out the Home Office had never had any travel documents for him.

What struck me most about that morning was that on way upstairs to knock on Aram's door, Kate said to the female immigration officer "I feel terrible." "Why?" she replied. "Do you have a cold?"

The officers were all polite and professionally cheerful, as if this were a routine bit of traffic duty rather than a dawn arrest. I am pretty sure they are all decent people, who believe in the work they do. But they could arrest a man who had not been accused of any crime, and take him into indefinite detention without a qualm. To them he was just a ‘failed asylum-seeker'. And when we cut ourselves off from people and label them, what won't we do to our fellow human beings?

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Arresting Aram, Craig Barnett