How a champion boxer got caught in Britain’s immigration dragnet
A little-known Home Office scheme designed to deport more ‘foreign criminals’ has left Kelvin Bilal Fawaz – and many others like him – living in an endless limbo.
Thursday 17 May 2018
The opening ceremony of the London Olympics, on 27 July 2012, should have been a moment of triumph for Kelvin Bilal Fawaz. The talented young boxer had recently been crowned the amateur light middleweight champion of England, and he was meant to be marching with the athletes of Team GB as they paraded into the Olympic Stadium.
Fawaz was born in Nigeria, and trafficked to Britain as a child – where he was rescued by the state and raised in care. Now he was a champion, ready to represent his country, with a lucrative professional career ahead of him. But there was one problem: he wasn’t a British citizen. In fact, it wasn’t clear if he had permission to stay in the UK at all. As a child, he had been given temporary leave to remain until just before he turned 18 – but he had to apply to extend this as an adult, and by 2012, at the age of 24, he was still waiting for a response. Like the rest of us, he watched the Games on television.
Since then, Fawaz has lost almost everything: his nascent career, his marriage, and ultimately, his liberty. Now 29, he has lived his entire adult life in the UK without valid immigration status, which means he has no right to work and is liable to be detained and deported at a moment’s notice. During the past decade, he has applied and appealed for extended leave to remain; he has applied for a spousal visa; he has even asked to be registered as stateless person. All these requests have been turned down by the Home Office, which considers his presence in the UK undesirable.
The Windrush scandal has brought attention to the “hostile environment” policy introduced by Theresa May in 2012 to drive unwanted immigrants from the UK. But Fawaz has become ensnared in a lesser-known policy – another Home Office scheme designed to remove immigrants, purportedly by targeting the most dangerous foreign criminals.
This is called Operation Nexus, a joint initiative between police forces and immigration enforcement. Launched in 2012, it has received little public scrutiny – official guidance notes describing it were only published last year. But it goes even further than previous schemes to deport “foreign criminals”, because it also targets people, such as Fawaz, who have never been to prison. In his late teens and early 20s, Fawaz received convictions for minor offences such as cannabis possession, driving without insurance and spraying graffiti; he points out that he has never received a harsher sentence than community service, and argues that he is a reformed character. For the Home Office, none of this matters.
In fact, the state has been trying to force Fawaz from the UK for several years – but he has nowhere to go. Although he was born in Nigeria, his mother came from Benin and his father from Lebanon. Nigeria won’t accept Fawaz as a citizen, and according to Fawaz, neither will his parents’ countries of birth. The Home Office doesn’t believe him, so it keeps trying. In the meantime, he survives on donations and trains at his local boxing gym. The gym is his life: he hoovers it, he cleans the toilets, he has even slept there when he’s had nowhere else to stay. Legally speaking, he has all but reached the end of the road. His best chance may well be to throw himself once more on the mercy of the Home Office and ask for the state to be sympathetic and make an exception.
In this regard, Fawaz has more in his favour than others who find themselves in similar situations. His talent is undeniable, and making a contribution through sport is a well-worn path to acceptance for immigrants. Fawaz has represented England in international competition six times, including against Nigeria: as he puts it, he has literally bled for his adoptive country, in the ring. He has made something of his turbulent life, and passes his knowledge on to young people and children at the gym, so that they might avoid the mistakes he once made. But the Home Office disagrees: its press officers point out that Fawaz has 15 criminal convictions in total. “When someone has no leave to remain in the UK, we expect them to leave the country voluntarily,” is their rote reply to journalists. “Where they do not, we will seek to enforce their departure.”
After years of living in uncertainty, Fawaz was suddenly arrested in November last year, placed in detention and told he would be imminently deported to Nigeria. His story became national news. A petition started by a member of the public demanding that the Home Office grant Fawaz British citizenship received more than 100,000 signatures. After several weeks in a detention centre, he was released on bail.
Our reactions to these stories follow a familiar pattern. Attention focuses on the merits of the individual: has this person worked hard, have they contributed, have they played by the rules? If they don’t deserve to be treated like this, then the implication is that other people do deserve it: “If only we could create an immigration system that caught the bad foreigners – the illegals and the criminals – and left the innocent alone.”
As more details come to light about the damage caused by the government’s “hostile environment” for unwanted immigrants, this question is at the forefront of political debate. But Fawaz’s story shows how, in trying to make an increasingly severe distinction between the deserving and the undeserving, the UK casts many people into a bureaucratic limbo that effectively criminalises their existence in this country. What if, instead of finding “illegal immigrants”, our policies are creating them?
In early February this year, I met Fawaz as he joined a group of campaigners from 38 Degrees to hand in his petition at the Home Office’s headquarters in Westminster. He arrived late, greeting each of us as if we were old friends. When he asked me to take a photo of him for his Instagram feed outside the Home Office entrance, he turned on the charm. “This is so good,” he exclaimed in a soft, London-inflected voice. He gave polite but firm instructions to the camera crew who were filming an interview with him: “Don’t just ask me how people can help. Ask me human questions.”
For several years now, there has been a trickle of stories about bizarre or apparently cruel decisions in immigration cases, in which people who have spent many years – or even their whole lives – in the UK are ordered to leave the country. In recent months, thanks to dogged reporting on the subject, the fate of the Windrush generation has become a national scandal. Now, the focus is widening to other people caught up in the “hostile environment”, the harsh system of internal border controls that the prime minister made her flagship policy when she was home secretary.
But our fractious national debate about immigration is based on three categories whose definitions are not fixed: “illegal”, “criminal” and “foreign”. In fact, it is easy to see how their meanings have shifted under the pressure of media outrage and government policy. During the last two decades, the shift has been in one direction: to broaden our idea of who is a foreign criminal and who is an illegal immigrant, which in turn justifies harsh new policies, and authoritarian structures.
At the centre of this is the Home Office, the government department with perhaps the most direct impact on our daily lives. It is responsible for the police, fire services, MI5, immigration and border control – in short, many of the ways in which a state is supposed to keep its citizens safe. But because of this role, it often finds itself under pressure from within government and without. On the one hand, it is frequently attacked by rightwing media for perceived failures to prevent crime or control immigration, and by liberal critics for apparent heavy-handedness. On the other, it sometimes sees itself at odds with fellow government departments, looking out for the ordinary British citizen while officials elsewhere make decisions based solely on what’s best for economic growth and competitiveness. The result, as a group of academic researchers concluded in their recent book Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies, is “an organisation that feels embattled and misunderstood”, which develops new policy “at an unusually high speed”, often in response to pressure from the media and with one eye on the news cycle.
Although the policies introduced by May were some of the most hardline yet, they are part of a longer-term pattern of anti-immigrant rhetoric. One of the flashpoints in this process is how the state deals with foreign-national offenders: people who aren’t British citizens who commit crimes in the UK. This is one of the most sensitive parts of the immigration system: serious crimes committed by people with limited or no right to be in the country often generate furious press coverage, as do bureaucratic obstacles to their removal, such as human rights laws.
It is often hard to tell what is the greater cause for outrage: the crime itself, or the foreignness of the offender. In this atmosphere, for more than a decade, successive governments have promised to deport ever-larger numbers of these people, but in doing so, they have followed a dangerous logic, whereby the nature of the threat we are supposed to be protected from has shifted – from particular crimes to a vague, expanding category of the “foreign criminal”.
The first big media storm about foreign criminals erupted in the summer of 2006, after it emerged that 1,000 foreign prisoners had been released at the end of their sentences without being considered for deportation, as the rules required. Labour’s home secretary, Charles Clarke, was forced to resign; his replacement, John Reid, declared the immigration directorate “not fit for purpose” and launched a series of reforms to restore public confidence in the system. UK borders were rebranded, with flags, insignia and uniformed staff, while a communications strategy focused on getting more immigration raids into the media. And in 2007, the UK Borders Act introduced the automatic deportation of “foreign criminals” convicted of serious crimes and imprisoned for more than 12 months.
Since its landslide victory in 1997, the New Labour government had tried to outflank its critics on the right by taking a tough line on crime and immigration. Rather than challenging the claim that these two phenomena were inextricably linked, it reinforced the idea: as late as 2010, Labour’s election manifesto contained a section entitled Crime and Immigration. In the early days of New Labour, the focus was on asylum seekers, who were the target of exaggerated press claims about people trying to exploit Britain’s system of refugee protection. In the early 2000s, Labour dramatically expanded Britain’s network of immigration detention centres in order to lock up asylum-seekers while their claims were processed. After 2007, the government found a new use for the additional facilities: to detain the increased number of foreigners who were being scheduled for deportation after their prison sentences had ended.
At a stroke, Labour had drastically expanded the definition of a dangerous foreign criminal. The policy had an immediate effect, raising the number of offenders removed from the UK from under 3,000 in 2007 to nearly 4,500 in 2008. But they did little to reduce the salience of immigration as an issue in the minds of voters or newspaper editors. When the Conservatives came to power, having pledged to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands”, the incoming home secretary Theresa May focused much of her energy on removing unwanted people from the UK. In 2012, she gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph in which she declared her intention to create “a really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants: initiatives to identify and deport people, or to make everyday life so difficult for them that they would leave of their own accord. A host of new laws followed in the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, which extended border control into everyday life by criminalising bureaucratic irregularities and forcing public servants and private companies to check the immigration status of prospective clients. These were accompanied by measures to encourage government agencies to collect and share immigration data more effectively.
At the same time, Operation Nexus was rolled out to a series of police forces in England. Its definition of “foreign criminal” is far broader than the policy that existed before 2007; broader, too, than how New Labour redefined it. Serious offenders fall under its remit, but so do people convicted of minor offences.
Yet if you look at the deportation figures, a strange picture emerges. The number of people deported from within the country (as opposed to those turned away at ports and airports) has stayed roughly steady at between 10,000 and 12,000 a year. That’s because deporting someone – an “enforced removal” in official euphemism – is a complicated process. A Home Office document entitled Country Returns Guide gives us some insight: this spreadsheet, a resource for civil servants, lists more than 200 countries and comments on how co-operative they are at taking their citizens back from the UK. Alongside each entry, wherever possible, are comments noting roughly how long it will take to issue a travel document (anywhere from a few days to six months, depending on the country), what kind of supporting evidence is required to prove a person’s nationality, and remarks on the country itself. In many cases the information is unclear or incomplete.
It is for this reason that many of May’s policies are aimed at convincing people to leave of their own accord. But while you might expect the number of so-called “voluntary returns” to have increased since 2012, there has been no significant growth here, either. Indeed, the total number of returns, voluntary or enforced, has actually fallen since 2014. So as new policies seek to bring more and more people into the state’s immigration dragnet, fewer people are being made to leave. Instead, they are thrown into a state of uncertainty that can last many years. This is what happened to Fawaz.
On Wednesday evenings, Stonebridge Boxing Club in north-west London is in full flow. When I visited, in mid-February, around 50 people were there for a training session, shouted at by a handful of coaches. The gym, on the second floor of a half-built office block, was hot with overworked bodies, and every 30 seconds or so there was a thud and a rattle as dozens of people, men and a few women, hit punchbags in unison. Most of the people there were black, Asian or eastern European. Stonebridge is in Brent, one of the most ethnically diverse parts of London; it is also one of the boroughs where, in 2013, the Home Office trialled a scheme to drive around advertising vans bearing the slogan: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.”
As I watched, Aamir Ali, the club’s owner, pointed people out to me: two of the coaches had boxed for Nigeria and Lebanon, respectively, at the 1992 Olympics. Mikael Lawal, a young Londoner of Nigerian heritage, is the first from the gym to turn professional. In the main ring, a boxer who had recently arrived from Kazakhstan was dispatching one challenger after another with rapid blows, not seeming to tire. He had come to the UK to try his luck at a professional career, Ali explained; a friend from his home village has lived in London for years and is a regular. “United Nations, is all I’m saying,” he joked.
Although immigration is nothing new to Britain, its nature and shape has changed in recent decades. Between 1993 and 2014, the number of foreign citizens living in the UK rose from nearly 2 million to more than 5 million. At the same time, a series of changes to the law have made it much harder for these residents to secure UK citizenship. Instead, Britain’s multiethnic communities live with a plethora of temporary and precarious forms of leave to remain. Academics call this “multi-status Britain” – people have jobs, lives and families here, but on paper they are foreign.
Fawaz arrived midway through the session, wearing an immaculate white T-shirt, fedora and ripped jeans that contrasted with everyone else’s sweaty gym gear. He walked around greeting people as a visiting celebrity might, then stood by a corner of the ring and watched the fight with the Kazakh boxer. His expression turned serious, and his head nodded in the rhythm of the two men.
Ali is Fawaz’s manager, and has been his benefactor since he spotted the boxer in 2012 – impressed not just by his skill, but the level of preparation he put into the fight. He remembers seeing Fawaz sitting by the ring, watching intently as his rival fought another man: “[It’s] his focus. His head was in there, he was feeling it.”
When Fawaz tells his story, he does it in soundbites and neat, well-worn anecdotes – the behaviour of a sportsman with one eye on fame, perhaps, but it is also what immigration control demands of its subjects. Testimony becomes everything, and the complex details of a life are turned into claims and counter-claims. By his account, this is roughly how it goes: he was born in northern Nigeria to a Lebanese father and a mother from Benin. His mother abused him (“You know when someone has a life that is not good for them and they take their anger out”) and his father left him with an “uncle” – either a relative or a family friend, Fawaz isn’t sure – in Lagos. During this time his mother was murdered in religious riots, and in 2004, when Fawaz was 14, his uncle announced that he was taking him to London to reunite him with his father. He was flown to the UK – on what documents, Fawaz doesn’t know – but instead of meeting his father, he was given to a family who held him captive and made him work as a domestic servant. After a few months, he escaped, and was taken into the care of social services in a west London borough.
In the back office of the gym, overlooked by wallpaper bearing the famous 1930s photo of New York workmen eating their lunch on the girder of a half-built skyscraper, Fawaz told me what happened to him after he escaped his captors. To use the language of child protection workers, he had been trafficked into domestic servitude. The government offers protection to trafficked children, but it has strict limits, to avoid opening up a kind of back door to permanent citizenship. In most cases, they are refused asylum and granted a type of temporary leave to remain that expires before they turn 18. This is usually on the basis that there are no safe reception facilities for children in their home countries, but it means that they spend the formative years of their lives not knowing if they will be expelled from the UK when they become adults. Frequent delays in processing applications, which can take several years, increase the uncertainty further – making it even more difficult for children raised in care to build stable adult lives.
Given temporary leave to remain, “while they worked out what to do with me”, Fawaz was placed in a group foster home in west London until he turned 16, then moved to a halfway house for older teenagers. There, he joined some of his new neighbours in what he described as “bad stuff. Weed, graffiti, sex with different girls, alcohol, smoking. It was only when I left that era that I looked back and I was like: ‘Oh my god, you really, really was going down.’”
In early adulthood, as he waited to find out if he would be allowed to stay in the UK, Fawaz received a string of minor criminal convictions. But this was also a period, he told me, in which his life began to change for the better.
First, he got involved in boxing, via a sports day at Brunel University in west London. Fawaz had always boxed by himself – he told me he made his own punchbag as a child in Nigeria – but this was his first proper introduction to the sport, and he discovered he had talent. After a few months, he had beaten everyone at Brunel, and moved on to All Stars, a long-running local club with a reputation for working with troubled young men. “My whole concept [of life] changed,” Fawaz said. “I had seen the rebellious side of London, the naughty side, the less ambitious side.”
Second, he met and fell in love with a young woman, who he married. “She retuned me, she made me see things differently,” he told me. Fawaz received a national diploma in sports science and was offered a place at university, although he couldn’t take it up because of his uncertain immigration status: without leave to remain, he was not eligible for a student loan. Gradually, his success in amateur boxing competitions – and the demands of training – led Fawaz further and further away from his old friends. In early 2012, he won the Amateur Boxing Association (ABA)’s national competition, becoming light middleweight champion of England. This convinced him to focus on his career, although he had not entirely put his old life behind him: his last criminal conviction was in 2014. Fawaz said a series of violent incidents, in which he was attacked or threatened, convinced him to completely break off contact with his former friends.
I asked Fawaz to imagine his life since arriving in the UK – his life in care, his shift from delinquency to boxing – as a line on a graph. He moved his hand upwards in a steep slope, representing his progress all the way until that championship victory in 2012. And then he dropped his hand, sharply. It was in that year that his request to stay in the UK – made years earlier, when he was still a teenager – was rejected. With his status unresolved, Fawaz had no right to work and could not turn professional: he says he had to turn down a contract from a top boxing promoter worth more than £200,000.
Next, Fawaz made a series of appeals that were turned down. The ABA wrote to the Home Office five times to ask that Fawaz be given travel documents and a work visa. Another attempt, to gain naturalisation via marriage, was rejected because Fawaz did not have the right to be in the UK at the time of his wedding. After several more years, having exhausted all legal avenues, he was issued with a document ordering him to leave the country, and told to sign in at an immigration reporting centre every week or face being detained.
And yet, he said, he still couldn’t obtain a passport from any other country. The stress of this period, Fawaz said, led to the breakup of his relationship in 2015. At that point, he told me, he stopped boxing: “I gave up. I lost everything, I lost my motivation, I started drinking.” He suffered depression, and during a period in between houses, would sometimes sleep on public transport.
“I got into trouble,” Fawaz said about his earlier years. “But it was just a kid who had no parental guidance. I never raped anyone, I never robbed a bank, I never beat anyone – ” he paused in frustration. “I’m a boxer. I had so much anger in me, and yet I never fought on the street. When people [were] fighting I [would] tell them there’s no point.” Later, Fawaz pulled up his sweatshirt to show me a tattoo of birds’ wings that ran along the length of his back. Underneath the feathers on the right-hand side, I could see a raised patch of skin – where, Fawaz said, a knife had punctured his lung.
Operation Nexus was Theresa May’s attempt to solve a problem that had bedevilled home secretaries since John Reid. Although the number of foreign-national offenders removed from the UK initially rose sharply, it has been stuck at roughly the same level ever since. Piloted in London, and since extended to other parts of England, Nexus is a way for police and immigration officials to identify “high harm” foreign national offenders and remove them.
Some police forces now station immigration officers in custody suites, and others make immigration checks on everyone they arrest. When a person applies for citizenship, or to extend their leave to remain, their details are cross-checked with police records and, if necessary, passed on to specialist Nexus casework teams employed by the Home Office. As with other immigration cases, people can appeal against the decision to remove them, and evidence will be heard at a tribunal.
But our notions of who counts as “illegal”, “criminal” and “foreign” depend on who defines them. And Nexus is playing a key role in broadening the terms of reference, so much so, in fact, that people with minor convictions – or even none at all – can find themselves labelled foreign criminals. On its own terms, the policy has been partly successful: between 2012 and 2015, for example, around 3,000 foreign-national offenders were removed.
Some of these people committed serious crimes, but not all of them: Nexus also considers cases based on ancient, spent and petty convictions, and carries out “intelligence-led” deportation. Immigration tribunals have less strict rules of evidence than criminal courts, and a person can be more easily referred to Nexus the less secure their immigration status is. If you have valid immigration leave, according to the official Nexus guidance notes published by the Home Office, the police have to believe you pose a “current and ongoing threat to the public” to be referred. If you have no valid immigration leave – if, say, you are waiting for a decision on your application – you merely need to be “subject to active police interest” in order to be sucked into Operation Nexus and put before a tribunal.
Melanie Griffiths, a social scientist at Birmingham University who has observed a number of Nexus-related appeals, has described how intelligence-led deportation leads to cases that “rest upon a medley of allegations, unproved assertions, hearsay, anonymous evidence, the behaviour of the appellant’s friends and circumstantial evidence”. Police often submit large bundles of evidence that include “non-convictions”: stop-and-searches where nothing is found, withdrawn charges, acquittals at trial and arrests that led to cautions or no charges. Officials are, in effect, able to paint a picture of serious criminality without having to definitively prove it.
Fawaz told me that at one of his appeal hearings, “they brought police officers to testify against me”, who claimed he was a gang member. When I spoke to him, he was indignant at the suggestion that his minor convictions – “just naughty child stuff” – suggested something more serious. Other Nexus cases appear to work in such a grey area too: among the examples Griffiths collected was a teenager of Caribbean descent deemed “at risk” of joining a gang, an Eritrean refugee convicted of “illegal working” and a homeless, alcoholic Bangladeshi man who stole a steak.
A standard defence of Operation Nexus would be that visitors to the UK have to abide by its laws, and that people should not commit crimes. Yet it exists in a context where the fact of living in the UK without secure immigration status is being treated increasingly like a crime itself.
This is happening in two ways. First, specific new crimes are being created: among their provisions, the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts introduced the offences of “illegal working” and “driving when unlawfully in the UK”. Behaviour that would previously have been treated as a bureaucratic irregularity is now the behaviour of a “foreign criminal”.
Second, enforcing the hostile environment involves treating immigrants – and people who look or sound like they might be immigrants – as potential criminals. Immigration enforcement officers have been granted greater powers to stop and detain people on the street. The laws compelling landlords, bank clerks, NHS staff and university administrators to check prospective clients’ immigration status turn ordinary citizens into border guards, while data-sharing initiatives on schoolchildren (cancelled by the Department of Education in April after a public campaign) or NHS patients (partially suspended earlier this month) increase the state’s powers of surveillance.
At the same time, it has become much harder to fight for the right to remain. Since 2012, people in the UK without status must live here for 20 years before they can apply for temporary leave to remain on the basis of “long residence”; it would take around 30 years in total to receive indefinite leave. Fawaz, who arrived in the UK aged 14, would be in his mid-40s if he took this uncertain route. It has become much harder to win an immigration appeal on human-rights grounds after new guidelines were introduced. Fees for citizenship applications have soared (from £200 in 2002 for indefinite leave to remain, to £2,389 in 2018), while cuts to legal aid as part of the coalition government’s austerity measures forced the collapse of the two main providers of free immigration advice.
But for all this effort, the removal figures for foreign-national offenders have not grown – they vary between around 5,000 and 6,000 a year. In 2014, the National Audit Office found that removing offenders cost £850m annually – and was hindered by poor administration and other countries not co-operating. Much like the other policies intended to make life difficult for unwanted immigrants, Operation Nexus aims to remove people, but ends up leaving many in a precarious and ultimately untenable position, as it has done to Fawaz: still in the country, but with their rights and ability to move freely severely limited.
Ivisited Fawaz again at the gym on a weekday afternoon when it was almost empty. Fawaz and a friend were in the ring together. Every now and then Fawaz would shout out advice to his less-skilled partner: to keep his feet moving, to think about his centre of gravity, to anticipate his opponent’s next move so he could dodge it.
“I’ll just take the punch,” said the friend through his mouthguard, in a moment of bravado.
“Why?” asked Fawaz. “Don’t take a punch unless you’re prepared to sacrifice something for it.”
Aware that I was watching, Fawaz began to expound his theory of boxing. “Power isn’t everything … I don’t waste all my energy, I play … I do salsa dancing – who said men can’t do feminine things?”
Stonebridge Boxing Club, Fawaz told me, is what rescued him after his marriage broke down. He began training there properly three years ago, occasionally competing for amateur titles: he won the ABA London middleweight championship in 2017. “I don’t want to waste the essence I have in me,” he said, explaining how he was trying to conserve his energy until his citizenship status was resolved. “So I made a conscious choice to only fight once a year.” His latest interest outside boxing is making afrobeats music: Fawaz sings, while a friend produces. He posts Instagram stories of himself dancing and singing in the studio. “I’m not a lazy person, you know,” he cautioned.
Towards the end of last year, a few months after an application to be considered stateless was rejected – again, the Home Office did not believe Fawaz when he said he wasn’t eligible for citizenship elsewhere – his resolve faltered. His depression came back, and he missed several of his weekly sign-in appointments at his local Home Office reporting centre. On 29 November, as Fawaz was on his way into the gym, the building was surrounded by police and he was arrested by immigration enforcement officers. He was kept overnight in Wembley police station, and then driven to a detention centre near Gatwick airport – where officials told Fawaz that they were preparing to deport him to Nigeria.
The UK places nearly 30,000 people in immigration detention each year, of whom half are foreign-national offenders. Detaining immigrants is officially supposed to be used as a last resort – and only when there is a reasonable prospect of imminently removing someone from the country. A recent Amnesty International report found that immigration detention has now become a “routine” procedure, in which administrative mistakes were common but difficult to put right. Once someone has entered detention, the report found, they are often kept there “as a matter of convenience”. Around half are released back into the community, which suggests that many should not have been in there in the first place. But the number of people released on bail from detention – living in limbo, as Fawaz now does – has more than doubled since 2010, to nearly 4,000 last year.
Fawaz was initially bullish when he described his time in detention, calling it a “clarification of the mind”. He said he had spent most of his time in the centre’s gym, or teaching himself how to play the piano. But it was obvious the experience had disturbed him. He said he had self-harmed several times while he was there – “not because I wanted to die but because it’s a relief for me” – and showed me marks on his wrists and forearms.
“For the first week, I felt like my life was finished,” he said. “Like an abandoned kid again.” His spirits were lifted when his case made national news. “Even the security in there came up to me and said: ‘You’re famous, man, everyone’s talking about you.’” Some weeks later, a representative of the Nigerian high commission told officials working on Fawaz’s case that he was not their citizen. On 2 January, an immigration tribunal appeals judge released Fawaz on bail, back to his old life of weekly sign-ins.
One evening at the end of January, Fawaz stepped on stage at Amnesty International’s events hall in east London. The audience had just watched Leon Gast’s documentary When We Were Kings, which tells the story of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s 1974 world heavyweight championship match in Zaire. The film still has a political charge: Ali and Foreman’s views on history, racism and the role that boxing plays in reclaiming black power sit uncomfortably next to contributions from Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, white American writers praising the physique of their black compatriots and shouting with glee as they fight in the ring.
The politics of the film were especially resonant at this event: a monthly club hosted by Welcome Cinema and Kitchen, an organisation that brings refugees, asylum seekers and the public together for social events. Many of the attendees were living with precarious legal status, and had come to hear Fawaz talk about his own situation.
Before the event, he had been entertaining children in the creche downstairs, showing off his title belts and cracking jokes as he posed for photos. But when he entered the hall and saw his picture projected on to a large screen, he gasped in surprise. Fawaz’s self-confidence is evident, but there is also a certain naivety that came from his upbringing: he told me that he had barely left the west London suburbs until his early 20s.
Since being released from detention, with the prospect of being recalled at any moment, Fawaz now has three possible routes. The first is to make another application to the Home Office: his lawyers are considering options for an appeal, supported by the 100,000 signatories of the 38 Degrees petition. If that fails, he could still be deported, but this is unlikely, since Nigeria, which usually co-operates with the UK in deportations, has been firm in insisting he is not theirs. This leaves a third route: an endless limbo as the UK tries unsuccessfully to remove him, and facing destitution if the donations he gets from friends dry up. Many of the people in the Welcome Cinema audience risked finding themselves in similar situations; some, perhaps, already were. This complex system for removing immigrants affects thousands of men, women and children in Britain today, yet as Melanie Griffiths points out in her research, it’s striking how recent a phenomenon it is.
Although states practised banishment or transportation throughout much of history, this largely stopped in the 19th century with the rise of the nation state. In the UK, deportation was reintroduced by our first modern immigration restrictions, the 1905 Aliens Act. But it was only during the 1990s that it began to be used on a large scale – at first to remove failed asylum seekers, and now as a more general tool for immigration control.
Operation Nexus is one of the most sensitive parts of this system; most politicians would shrink from giving it proper scrutiny. Yet as Fawaz’s story suggests, it seems to offer little room for redemption, which is usually regarded as an important part of the criminal justice system. There is also a wider question about equality before the law: do certain people deserve to be punished twice for a crime, on the basis of their immigration status?
Because of existing bias in sentencing, ethnic-minority communities are the most affected by efforts to deport foreign-national offenders: black and Asian men are over-represented in the prison population, while around 75% of immigration detainees are of Afro-Caribbean or Asian origin; Griffiths’s research found that barely any north Americans or Australians end up in detention. And the broader effort to force unwanted immigrants from Britain falls mainly on black, Asian and eastern European shoulders. Even some EU citizens have been caught up in the hostile environment: a policy to deport EU rough sleepers was ruled unlawful by the high court in December, after a case brought on behalf of two Polish men and a Latvian. These are the people whose work Britain demands when the economy requires it, and whom it rejects when they are surplus to requirements.
The drive to make expulsions easier is also adding a chapter to Britain’s relationship with its former colonies: the UK is spending £700,000 to build a prison wing in Nigeria for deportees, and has offered to fund a maximum-security prison in Jamaica. Deportation charter flights, in which immigration detainees are removed en masse, now operate several times a year to West Africa and South Asia.
Governments often try to make distinctions between good citizens and bad citizens – the welfare scroungers v the hard-working families – but the way Britain has hardened its borders has created a situation that many of us were unaware of until recently, in which people who have lived in this country for many years find their right to stay here permanently under question. Griffiths calls them “almost citizens”. I mentioned this to Fawaz: “That’s me!” he exclaimed. “You know when you chuck a leaf in a stream of water and you don’t know where it’s going, you just – I have no control over this now. At this point, it’s up to the Home Office to give me a chance. To say: yes you can stay.”
Fawaz’s first name – Kelvin – is a nickname he acquired as a teenager. At our last meeting, I asked him where he had got it from. “I just made it up when I came here,” he told me. “Because I kept on telling people my name is Bilal Fawaz and they couldn’t pronounce it, so I said: ‘OK, my name is Kelvin.’ I wanted to sound more British. I took on the persona.”
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