Release!

After the pain and anguish of the past two months, good news! Fatou Tamba’s family have announced she is back home. After a third attempt to put her on a plane to The Gambia, the Home Office had to acknowledge the law had not been properly followed, and she was released on bail. Her community in Liverpool wants to thank everyone in the wider community that acted upon hearing of the injustice done to her.

And we wish to remind everyone that every day there are women incarcerated in Derwentside, as Fatou was, just as unfairly deprived of their liberty without due process – to satisfy the drive to bring down numbers in the national immigration statistics.

It is high time those statistics showed figures for how many people who have lived for years in this country, contributing to its prosperity, are being picked up with no warning, like Fatou, from the reporting centres they have dutifully attended  while waiting endless months for their cases to be resolved.

And it is more than time to revive calls for community alternatives to detention that allow women to pursue their asylum claims outside the walls of Derwentside.