Any immigration practitioner will be able to relate to the Windrush stories which have been in the news recently. The 'hostile environment' introduced during Teresa May's tenure as Home Secretary helped create a culture within the Home Office that stopped treating people as humans and started treating them as targets.
I am delighted that the Home Office's practices are now in the media spotlight as I hope this will effect serious and positive changes in a very flawed system. However, common decency should have prevailed without the need for the Guardian to be involved.
With Brexit only around the corner, the Home Office have indicated that they are keen to avoid a similar scandal arising with EU nationals. The Home Office's statement of intent was published last week and already we have seen a much more reasonable approach to applications made for EU nationals and their family. This is a change from current practices and is encouraging.
However, I cannot help but wonder: did the lawmakers in the 1940's envisage the possibility of the Windrush scandal when they welcomed Windrush migrants to the UK's shores? Can today's lawmakers learn from these mistakes and protect EU nationals from future systematic failures and unlawful practices? Finger's crossed.
In the report published on Friday, MPs and peers on the Joint Committee on Human Rights said the Home Office demonstrated a "wholly incorrect approach to case-handling and to depriving people of their liberty". Individuals were locked up unless they could satisfy officials they should not be detained - an approach with the report described as "simply unlawful". "It is for the Home Office to satisfy itself that it has a power to detain an individual - not for an individual to have to satisfy the Home Office that they should not be detained," the report said.
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