The government has announced this week that the Home Office's flawed eVisa scheme will be used for immigration raids. So I've followed up my email to my MP to alert her to this development. The Open Rights Group are coordinating an effort to make MPs aware and ask for resistance to this scheme.
Dear Layla,
I wrote to you recently about the Home Office’s flawed eVisa scheme.
This week, little noticed in media reporting on the Prime Minister’s unconscionable ‘island of strangers’ targeting of immigrants speech, the Government announced that the eVisa scheme would be used to support immigration raids. If this goes ahead, people with the legal right to be in the UK could be deported because of flaws in the Home Office’s systems.
Since the rollout of the eVisa scheme, the human rights organisation, the Open Rights Group, has heard about travellers stranded at airports, refugees unable to rent a home or get a job, and even a man being made homeless because of a data error. But these harms would pale into significance if eVisa data is used for immigration raids that result in deportation.
Please will you contact the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Yvette Cooper and urge her to stop eVisa data from being used for immigration raids and press again for the government to provide offline alternative for people to prove their immigration status when the eVisa is not working. The seeds of another Windrush scandal have been sown and are sprouting.
Regards,
Ray
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