Just as we thought that immigration officers had every aspect of our daily lives covered - needing the right passport for getting married or getting work or medical treatment or a roof over our heads – their renamed body HOIE (Home Office Immigration Enforcement), woke up to the fact that it had failed to intervene in our relationship with God. I don’t happen to have one (since you ask, I ended it) but religiosity is high among immigrant communities and it was one area of their lives that had blossomed from the lack of surveillance until border agents were placed in Gurdwaras, Hindu temples and any religious institutions gullible or misguided or downright antagonistic to their own congregations to take them. Rita Chadha of RAMFEL (Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London) has described this as ‘the last bastion of the immigrant invaded’.
Activists became aware of this development when a six-month pilot programme, Operation Skybreaker which targeted employers, faith groups and registry offices in five London boroughs – Brent, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Ealing and Greenwich – was set up in July 2014. However, on further investigation, the Home Office press office said that the first ‘voluntary returns surgery’ in a place of worship was set up in 2009. Although the spokesperson was not able to give exact numbers, he stressed that this was only a London wide phenomenon. The Brent Anti-Racism Project made contact with local places of worship in order to alert them to their rights. They found that those faith groups which co-operated were less likely to suffer raids by immigration. One of the mosques had been raided and were reluctant to host HOIE clinics although the Hindu temple appeared to have happily welcomed their presence.
Southall Balck Sisters UK Border agency demonstration I visited the ‘surgery’ at that temple which has been running for over a year. The administrator thought the scheme was a great success because 20-24 people had been sent back in the first six months with most returning to Ahmedabad in India. When the temple was initially approached by the Home Office, they wanted reassurances about how the scheme was run because ‘people are fearful of immigration officers, especially people in uniforms. We don’t want people to be scared, this is a temple’. Sure enough, there were no uniforms, no signs of officialdom except for a discreet lanyard inscribed with the words ‘Home Office Immigration Enforcement’ that hung around the neck of one of the two young Asian women running the session. The desk itself was placed in the corner of a large hall at the back of the temple misleadingly signposted as ‘Toilets’. Or perhaps not so misleading.
