Tony Hall has lived in the UK for 50 years. Why is the Home Office trying to deport him?

W hen Tony Hall was released from detention in 2012, his family rallied around to support him. One of his five older sisters said he could stay with her for a while. A nephew printed business cards and designed a website for him so he could advertise his services as a painter and decorator, to make the most of the vocational training he received while he served his prison sentence. But for 14 years he has been unable to make use of the cards because of a Home Office decision that he should be deported. All this time he has been kept on a deportation list, which means he cannot work, rent somewhere to live, receive benefits or do anything that would allow him to start rebuilding his life. Instead, he remains on the edge of destitution, reliant on the kindness of family and friends to survive. Eight years ago, when the Windrush scandal erupted into the national consciousness, it triggered the resignation of the then-home secretary Amber Rudd. Subsequently, there were a string of repeated promises to right the wrongs done to a group of people who migrated to Britain from Caribbean Commonwealth countries in the 1950s and 1960s, and to their children who often followed later, and were wrongly treated as illegal immigrants despite having a right to live in the UK. But for some, justice has been elusive, particularly for those who appear, in the eyes of the Home Office, to be the wrong kind of victim. On paper, Hall doesn’t instantly present as a straightforward, heartstring-tugging case study. In 2001 he was convicted of a serious crime – conspiracy to rob and having a firearm with intent; he spent eight years in prison. He had been planning with friends to hold up a security van taking money to a bank; he was carrying a toy gun, but there was also a real gun in the car. Police stopped them before a crime was committed. His case is complex, but when successive governments promised to resolve the problems that the Home Office created for members of the Windrush generation, they didn’t restrict themselves to putting right only the difficulties experienced by people with uncomplicated lives. The principle of rehabilitation suggests that Hall, having served his sentence, should then have been allowed to restart his life, as his co-defendants did. Since his release from prison, Hall, 62, who was born in Barbados , but who has lived in Britain since travelling here at the age of 12 in 1976, has been trying to persuade the Home Office that deportation to a country he has not visited for half a century is unreasonable. So far, his efforts have been in vain. Every fortnight Hall must attend an appointment at a Home Office reporting centre, carrying a document printed with his mugshot above a letter that warns him he is liable to be detained “pending a decision to deport you/because a decision has been made to deport you”. The journey there takes him the best part of two hours, and involves a few stops on the overground, a short bus ride, then six stops on the underground and another bus ride, followed by a queue at the reporting centre, a brief checking of documents and the reverse trip home. By now, he estimates that he has performed this time-consuming ritual more than 350 times. View image in fullscreen Hall’s mother, who gradually brought her children over from Barbados to join her in London. Photograph: Courtesy of Tony Hall The fortnightly reporting requirement is often imposed on people who have claimed asylum, or have other unresolved immigration issues, to prove that they are complying with the Home Office rules. It is a stressful process because each time you visit the centre, you could, in theory, be arrested and taken to a detention centre ahead of deportation. It is extremely rare for this state of limbo to continue for more than a decade. Hall has mostly given up trying to discuss his situation with the officials who sign him in. “Sometimes I feel mad at them,” he says. “I tell them: ‘I’ve been here for 50 years.’ They say: ‘That’s not my department. We’re not here to do your case.’” Hall acknowledges that he behaved stupidly as a younger man. But he also points out that he has served a long sentence and despairs at still being unable to start afresh. When his sentence was over, he was transferred to immigration detention and, in January 2010, the Home Office put him on a flight to Barbados. He was returned to London on the same plane, arriving back the following day, because border officials in Barbados refused to let him into the country; they appear to have been unwilling to issue him with papers to enter because of the length of time he had been in the UK. His memories of Barbados are hazy and he has no surviving relatives there. When he sees photographs of the island he recognises nothing; the idea of being deported there seems absurd to him, but UK officials refuse to lift the order, even though it seems unlikely that it can ever be enforced. When he was imprisoned in 2001, his flat was emptied by the council and his belongings thrown away; he has no paperwork tying him to either country, and is effectively stateless. Like most people affected by the Windrush scandal , Hall’s difficulties with his immigration status go back to mistakes or oversights made by officials decades ago. For him to fully explain his situation requires him to set out his life story in a way that can feel uncomfortably exposing. Hall wants people to read these details because he hopes that it might finally nudge someone within the Home Office to exercise discretion and lift the deportation order that has hampered his life for 14 years. It is a story that, like the life stories of most people affected by the Windrush scandal, closely tracks Britain’s colonial past and its shifting attitudes towards immigration. Hall was born in a rural area of Barbados, and was brought up by his grandparents because his mother was living in London with his stepfather, who was working as a mechanic for British Rail. Saving money from her job in a Gordon’s Gin factory, she gradually brought her children over to join her in London, first his five older sisters, and finally in 1976, her youngest child, Tony. His early childhood in Barbados was not particularly warm, as a left-behind “barrel child” (the term for that generation of children, left in the Caribbean with relatives, waiting for parcels containing clothes and food sent from their parents in England in barrels). His grandparents had a small farm with some sheep and pigs, and he had to help out. He remembers going to school smelling of pig manure and being teased by other children. He arrived in Britain with a strong Barbadian accent and a pronounced stammer, which he still has. View image in fullscreen Suella Braverman, who closed down the Windrush unit while home secretary in 2023. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian Initially, he found it hard to acclimatise. He struggled to fit in at the large north London secondary school where his older sisters were studying. “People couldn’t understand what I was saying. I’m not embarrassed by my stammer now, but it was quite hard then.” He says he was relaxed about the high levels of casual racism he encountered at the school, where there were shouts of “Black bastard”. “They were just kids,” he says. He was sent to a speech therapist and, because he was so unsettled, later dispatched to live in a children’s home. After committing some minor crimes, he was then sent to borstal. “I think I was a bit disturbed. It was difficult, my sisters leaving one by one, being left with my grandparents. I played up a lot,” he says. “When I was young I was a bit of a tearaway; I was a pain. Once you get into trouble, it’s hard to get out.” Most of it was “silly petty stuff”, he says. “I’ve paid the price. I’ve grown up a bit.” There have been significant positive developments since Theresa May’s apology for the Home Office’s treatment of the Windrush generation in 2018; more than 18,000 people have subsequently been issued with documentation, confirming their right to remain in the United Kingdom, and about £132m in compensation has been paid out to 4,177 people who were misclassified as immigration offenders, and lost their jobs or their homes as a result, or in extreme cases were wrongly deported or arrested. But a significant number of people are still coming up against Home Office intransigence as they try to sort out historic problems. Since Rudd resigned over the scandal in April 2018, Britain has had to learn the names of seven new home secretaries, each with a different approach to tackling the fallout. Sajid Javid set up a Windrush unit with a view to resolving the difficulties experienced by those affected. In 2023 , Suella Braverman closed it down. A year later Yvette Cooper re-established the team . In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour promised: “We will ensure the victims of the appalling Windrush scandal have their voices heard.” Some people, like Hall, are still struggling to get anyone to listen. Martin Forde is a barrister who has been working to support people affected by the scandal since designing the compensation scheme in 2019. “Compassion is not exactly their middle name,” he says of the Home Office, expressing frustration at the number of people still encountering problems. “My strong suspicion is that there are many of these cases; many will be people of no fixed abode who won’t want to put their head above the parapet,” he says. He is troubled by the second punishment often meted out to people with precarious immigration status, when they break the law. “It goes against a sense of fairness to have this double jeopardy.” For the moment, Hall lives with the sister closest in age to him, but she is planning to move house and will soon be unable to accommodate him, leaving him facing the prospect of street homelessness. “I can’t help but feel angry for him. They’ve treated him so badly, wasting 14 years of his life, keeping him in limbo. It feels so cruel. He should be treated like the rest of his family – we’re all citizens here,” this sister says, asking not to be named. She is employed by a large London council working with children with special needs and did not want her employers to be aware of these private difficulties. She and her sisters managed the transition from Barbados to England more easily. They all applied for citizenship and received it in the 1970s, at the time when Tony was still in care, living a more chaotic life. Failures by local authorities to help secure immigration status for those in their care has caused problems for large numbers of people. View image in fullscreen ‘When I was young I was a bit of a tearaway. I’ve paid the price.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian “Tony has a real heart and is a very loyal friend,” she says. “He had a rough start in life, and he struggled a bit expressing himself and making people understand him. It had an impact on his self-esteem. He made a mistake; he got caught up with the wrong people and he was sentenced. But he’s done the time, paid the penalty, and now he wants to be able to live a normal life, to be able to work. Since coming out of prison his record has been clear; he hasn’t done anything wrong in the past 25 years, but they’re still holding it against him. He has missed out on all the things that any normal person would do, and has had to depend on