Some of us get up to our first cup of coffee and the morning news.
Some of us do not have the choice of a latte or a frothy cappuccino as a morning treat but are offered the invidious choice between destitution or voluntary return. If you choose destitution, you are forcibly deported. Dawn raids usher in the third wave of state violence directed against precarious Black and Brown people across the UK.
Dawn raids are part of an entrenched, bipartisan UK state sanctioned policy designed to sustain the border-industrial-complex with its machinery of indefinite detention, forced deportation and destitution that monetizes Black and Brown bodies for profit.
Last week a family in Glasgow opened the door to unannounced visitors at 7am on a cold morning. These were not friends but around nine immigration enforcement officers who swarmed into their home. As soon as the raid started, all the family phones were confiscated. They could not access legal representatives, friends, support networks or local MP’s. They were separated from each other into rooms that had now become holding pens. They were followed everywhere including into the toilet. In an instant, this family home became a make-shift detention centre in the community. The father collapsed, the mother suffered a panic attack and the adult daughter who they had nurtured back to health from open heart surgery was left isolated and alone.
Dawn raids are a form of state violence designed to humiliate and erase the humanity of families across the country and strip them of their dignity. We know that the Hostile Environment policy piloted by Labour and fine-tuned by successive Conservative governments targets migrants and asylum seekers. We know that this targeted expansion of the carceral state is designed to placate and soothe right-wing electoral vote banks. We know that this policy seeds trees of hate that bear strange fruit- Black and Brown bodies in fear of their lives, transported back to torture, tribal violence and rape.
The Hostile Environment is funded by our taxpayer money and unless we #STOPDAWNRAIDS we become complicit. We are all in this together. Dawn raids leave us all scarred and brutalized. We refuse to keep calm and carry on. We refuse to walk over Black and Brown lives to our post-Covid, economic recovery and growth. We demand for the government to #STOPDAWNRAIDS.
• Be vigilant
• Watch out for immigration enforcement vans in your neighbourhood
• Take out your phones and record raids, evidence of state violence is the only way we #STOPDAWNRAIDS
• Check in with friends and neighbours with precarious status, protect their privacy and keep status information confidential
• Get numbers of lawyers
• Contact support organisations
• Contact your local MP/MSP, raise awareness and demand #STOPDAWNRAIDS
• Show your solidarity this Saturday 30th April from 11am by attending the demo in George Square