Dear Editor,

The Guardian publication dated May 12, 2022 observes, “Most of the Jamaicans facing deportation from the UK on a controversial Home Office charter flight next week arrived in Britain as children, according to analysis passed to The Guardian.”

I could not help asking: Is this a Jubilee celebration flight? It brings into sharp focus the vulnerability of the powerless to the unbridled bullying of the powerful.

One understands that countries which have been wronged by offenders who entered their borders illegally may deport them to their place of origin.

Are human rights concerns of any significance when many of those to be deported share certain common experiences? Some are connected to the Windrush generation. Some were brought as little children to England. One of the 32 children to lose his or her father is a one-month-old baby. Another is a newborn.

Where are the pro-birth voices? Where is the advocacy from human rights groups in England?

It is not surprising that many of those to be deported present with learning difficulties, mental health challenges, and I would note particularly, depression, schizophrenia, psychosis, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In other words, we continue to see some of the attendant consequences of the genocide set in trian by the holocaust of slavery. Every deportation flight is a reminder of the necessity for reparatory justice. When the evidence shows that some of the victims of the circumstaces at hand were groomed as children for crime, the British Government must accept its failure in preventing the breeding ground for such crimes against children.

If the necessary intervention of reparatory justice was being exercised on home ground in England, much of those crimes committed by those being deported may have been averted.

Antonia Bright of Movement for Justice must be commended for noting that: “This is transportation not deportation. This flight is full of people who’ve been raised in the UK since childhood.” Amnesty International also recognises the injustice.

Given Prince William’s seeming quest for a more human touch, I could not help wondering: What might be his take on all of this? And given the Church’s many prayers for justice, I could not help wondering: What might be the position of agents of the Church across denominations in Britain?

While the Home Office celebrates the removal of 10,000 foreign criminals since 2019, how does it respond to Bella Sankey, director of the charity Detention Action, who courageously declares truth: “If someone has lived in Britain most of their lives, then they are British in all but name and they are our responsibility.”

Fr Sean Major-Campbell

Anglican priest and advocate for human rights

seanmajorcampbell@yahoo.com