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Operation Skybreaker is a 5-month plan by the Home Office in parts of Tower Hamlets, Brent, Ealing, Newham and Greenwich to work with businesses and community groups to stop ‘illegal’ immigration. The first part is soft – they are asking businesses if they can come in and check their records, sometimes promising not to arrest people. But do not be fooled by these ‘friendly tactics’ – the second part of Operation Skybreaker will involve carrying out raids in these areas, no doubt helped in this by the information they find in stage one. They will work with HMRC and other agencies on this.

No Co-operation with Immigration Officers

• Legally, you do not have to sign consent forms letting them come in.

• Immigration officers often ask people’s permission to come in because they do not actually have evidence that you are committing an offence, which they need to get a warrant.

• Refusing immigration officers entry to your home or business is not evidence of a crime.

• Letting them in gives them access to information they could use to raid your home or business later on. For example, it could give them information they need to get a warrant.

• Working with immigration officers only gives them more power. The only way to stop these raids is to resist together and show support & solidarity with people being targeted.

During our outreach, we have found that a lot of people have been signing consent forms. However, when we’ve told people that there is no obligation to sign, many said that they were unaware that it was voluntary, while others said “you can’t do anything to stop them – they do whatever they want”. In practice of course, it is very hard to refuse – regardless of whether this is your legal right. Only with strong and persistent collective resistance and non-cooperation do we stand a chance of really fighting back and keeping immigration officers out of our neighbourhoods.

Find out more

We are having a public meeting for people living and working in Tower Hamlets on November 13th, 6-8pm at the Praxis Centre, Pott Street, Bethnal Green, E2 0EF. You are invited to come and find out more about your rights and & discuss what we can do to stop these immigration raids.

 

‘How the Home Office Tackles Illegal Working’ was published on 17th December by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), David Bolt. ICIBI reports generally provide useful insight into the murky world of immigration enforcement.

Here are some of the report’s main findings and criticisms:

• Criticism was leveled at the disproportionate number of raids targeting takeaways and restaurants, due to the fact that most of the ‘intelligence’ consisted of ‘low-level allegations made by members of the public, which were lacking in detail and the reliability of which was difficult to assess.’ It said that ‘other business sectors and possibly other nationalities had been neglected by comparison.’ The Home Office responded that it was trying to ‘diversify’ its range of targets through its current project, ‘Operation Magnify’. They list care, cleaning and construction as possible sites of increased immigration enforcement in the near future.

• Bolt and his team show themselves to be big fans of the softly-softly tactics employed in ‘Operation Skybreaker’, mostly on grounds of cost effectiveness. Skybreaker was a six-month operation running from July-Dec 2014, which saw immigration officers visit businesses ‘consensually’ with a view to gathering intelligence, getting employers involved in the web of immigration control and reporting, and trying to persuade people to leave ‘voluntarily’ (ie, with financial incentives). Obvious benefits of Skybreaker lay in its friendly veneer and the fact that these visits essentially acted as reccies, allowing officers to gather information necessary to conduct full blown raids later on. Our suspicion about this was confirmed by the report. Bolt calls for the extension of Skybreaker tactics, so we can expect more of this in the year to come.

• The report details various unlawful practices by Immigration Enforcement. None of these come as any surprise given the experiences we hear from people affected by raids. The allegations of unlawful conduct include:

– coercive tactics used to question whole groups people (who are meant to be questioned ‘consensually’, and where specific individuals are suspected of being immigration offenders);

– unlawful pursuits off the premises, which the Home Office acknowledged it had done, but said it was ‘reviewing’ its pursuit policy anyway. Yep, when you’re accused of acting illegally, just change the law;

– ‘consent’ to enter a property obtained by the occupier through ‘verbal authority’ rather than written agreement. In its response, the Home Office also said that it was completely reviewing its enforcement guidance, and expected to complete this task by March 2016.

Other interesting info revealed in the report

So-called AD letters (Home Office Assistant Director internal authorisation) now appear to be a much less common means of obtaining entry to businesses. This comes after a telling-off by ICIBI in a previous report. Officers are currently relying primarily on the ‘consent’ of the occupier to gain entry (in well over 50% of cases), or on magistrates’ warrants. Consent is required in writing but evidence showed IE were relying on ‘verbal authority’.

The report found that from 2009-2014, on average, 68% of raids for illegal working result in no illegal workers being found. In these same raids, 50% of arrestees ended up being deported.

Our position

We do not want to see a reformed system of immigration enforcement; we want to see its end. This can only be achieved by building a culture of refusal to collaborate and cooperate with Immigration Enforcement, and of active solidarity with those being arrested when raids are taking place.

According to information released this month via a Freedom of Information request  and shared with us (refused by the Home Office but subsequently released on request for review), Enforcement Teams in London conducted 12,026 ‘visits’ to homes, businesses and other sites in 2014. Visits include both raids to arrest and detain migrants, but also information and intelligence gathering of the kind we saw in last year’s Operation Skybreaker.

This works out to an average of 33 per day – or 231 per week – across London. The now thankfully defunct TV show UK Border Force last year bragged that  “London and South East Enforcement Teams carry out over 100 raids a week”.

Today the Prime Minister of the new Tory government promised to continue this war against ‘unwanted’ migrants in Britain – black & brown, and above all working class and poor – with promises to criminalise migrants working without permission, roll out landlord checks on prospective tenants, prevent people from opening bank accounts, and end immigration appeals.

The only way to answer this is widespread refusal to collaborate with the rich parasites who run this country and to show maximum solidarity with our ‘illegal’ brothers and sisters. We can share information on people’s rights, such as the multilingual information on this site. This is empowering, creates cultures of solidarity, and can protect individuals during checks and raids. However, as the government promises to enforce its policy of ‘deport first, appeal later’ (i.e., not at all), and erode more and more of our freedoms, it is not enough to focus solely on rights. Information-sharing is one tool, but not our only one.

We have a vision. A city – a country, a world – with zero tolerance for attacks and harassment by cops, home office ‘enforcers’, or private security. Where if the uniformed bullies turn up to smash someone’s door in, barge their way into a workplace, or stop people in the street, they get surrounded by neighbours and passers-by who know the score and won’t take their bullshit.

We’ve seen this happen, we’ve been part of this happening, and it’s a beautiful thing. The moments where we say: ‘No’, these are our streets, here we fight for each other. This is what we want to help grow and spread: a culture where we stand up for ourselves and for each other, a culture of defiance and solidarity. As the government ‘socially cleanses’ vast swathes of this country, let’s make this our response.

By The No

As you might know, Clapton Football Club, eight leagues below Premier League neighbours, West Ham United, has recently become the adopted home to a fast-growing group of fans who are disillusioned with the professional game and want to put their antiracist, anticapitalist, community-centric politics into action.

Clapton play their home games in Forest Gate, and one Saturday a few weeks ago a handful of us sought to demonstrate our support for people who live and work near our ground who are increasingly being targeted by the government’s racist anti-immigrant agenda.

The Home Office’s Operation Skybreaker – a name as naff as its aims are sinister – has already seen gangs of immigration officers engaging withbusinesses in Newham (amongst other boroughs) whose employees or customers might be undocumented.

And by engaging with we should be clear we mean harassing, intimidating, misinforming, entering without express permission, and rinsing information from people by whatever snide means they can.

These visits are basically pre-raids, and are principally about enabling the immigration enforcement to mess up more and more people’s lives.

In response to Skybreaker invasions, the ever-awesome London Black Revs already staged a well-received action at Queen Street market in nearby Upton Park, offering local people Anti Raids Network cards with information about their rights. Our plan was to try and do a our bit on our home patch.

We met at a local café for a bit of training from a Clapton-supporting member of Newham Monitoring Project before heading out in pairs with cards in English, Bengali, Punjabi, Arabic and a few other languages.

We had prepared ourselves for the possibility of shop and café owners being too busy to entertain us or unsure what to make of a bunch of (albeit friendly) football fans. After all, most of us were wearing our Clapton scarves ahead of our local derby with Barking later that day (0-0, in case you wondered).

However the response we received was not only welcoming, but in some cases revelatory.

We spoke to the owners of two adjoining convenience shops at the bottom of Upton Lane one of whom we had heard had already given Home Office Robocops their marching orders when they’d tried their charm offensive (stress on the offensive) recently.

The shopkeepers clearly knew they were allowed to ask these thugs to leave their premises if they didn’t have a warrant, but they were receptive to the idea of handing out our cards so their customers know their rights as well.

Others, though, were less aware of their rights. Another shopkeeper told us about the form the police and immigration officials made him sign, saying he gave permission for them to be in his shop (something we’d touched on in the training, and which no one is under any obligation to sign).

Another reported police demanding access to the rented-out flat upstairs in relation to an unspecified incident 15 years ago. Why? Checking for who might be living there? As the man said, God knows what they were looking for.”

There was the white shop owner who was emphatic in his view that he was treated with infinitely more respect by the uniformed bullies than most of the neighbouring businesses.

And the café owner who said he’d not only take cards, but he’d happily put a poster in his window.

And the NHS health centre staff who accepted the cards without hesitation as necessary information for local patients.

And the travel agency who invited us to sit down before telling us in detail about when their tiny shop was visited by seven or eight tooled-up immigration officers demanding to see who they employed (without warrants), advising them they risked arrest if they did not share their ID (untrue) or answer their questions (ditto).

I had to leave this visit early: the combination of the abuse they depicted and the calm, resigned way these men spoke about their treatment just floored me.

I am pretty sure I don’t just speak for myself when I say the couple of hours we spent talking to these good people made a massive impression on me. This is happening now, and it only promises to intensify as the route to political power becomes more about how the government is seen to crush those who it deems are not welcome in our communities.

As Clapton fans and, for the most part, new members of this community, we intend to offer our neighbours our solidarity.

We’ll be back doing the rounds before our Saturday home games in November, and it would be great if others came and joined us. More details on the Anti Raids blog here.

Did you know…?

• You don’t have to sign papers letting immigration officers into your home or shop.

• During a raid, you don’t have to answer any questions about your immigration status when immigration officers or the police ask you.

• You are legally entitled to leave if you haven’t been arrested.

Tower Hamlets is one of the London boroughs currently being targeted by ‘Operation Skybreaker’, a 5-month plan by the Home Office to stop illegal working. We believe immigration raids are racist & we can fight them if we work together.

To find out more about your legal rights & talk about what we can do to defend our communities against immigration raids and arrests, come to our public meeting on November 13th, 6-8pm at the Praxis Centre, Pott St, Bethnal Green E2 0EF.

Organised by the Anti Raids Network & Right to Remain.