United Kingdom: Activists Blockade Mass Deportation Flight.. 17 arrests
Police have arrested 17 anti-deportation protesters who locked themselves to an aircraft at Stansted airport, preventing a charter flight due to remove asylum seekers and other migrants from the UK from taking off.
The protesters locked themselves to the wing of a Titan Airways flight and refused to move. All 17 protesters involved with the action have been arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass and are now in police custody.
Essex police said they had received reports that a group of protesters gained access to Stansted airport’s airside at about 9.30pm on Tuesday night. A spokesman said: “We were contacted by Stansted airport after protesters entered and locked themselves on to an aircraft destined for Nigeria. Officers remain at the scene to carry out further investigations. Inquiries are ongoing.”
Campaigners said the protest was to stop a Home Office “mass deportation charter flight” from the Essex airport to Nigeria and Ghana. They said that deportees on the flight included people who feared for their lives and had claimed asylum……
The Home Office had unsuccessfully attempted to remove her on Saturday evening. She complained that she was placed in a waist belt restraint and dragged along by the chain “like a goat”. Her lawyers mounted a last-minute legal challenge on Tuesday night and a high court judge ruled that she should not be put on the plane.
The activists were from three groups – End Deportations, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants (LGSMigrants) and Plane Stupid, an environmental and social justice direct action group.
One of the protesters at the scene, Emma Hughes, of End Deportations, said: “This is an unprecedented victory in the fight against mass deportations, which are racist, violent and kill people … This is just the beginning – we’ll keep fighting until the government agrees to stop charter flights and mass deportations once and for all.”
One woman who was due to be put on the flight, in an article on the Detained Voices website, said: “My ex-husband said he knows I am being deported. He is waiting for me. He is planning to kill me. If he kills me who will look after my children?”
A male deportee said: “I have been in this country for almost 18 years. My family and my life is here in the UK. If they take me back to Ghana I will kill myself.”
Sam Jones, from LGSMigrants, said: “For too long the government has kept these brutal mass deportation flights under wraps. The UK government is snatching people from their beds in the dead of night, handcuffing them and forcing them on to planes with no witnesses. I don’t think that’s the kind of society most of us want to live in. We must stop these violent mass deportations now.”
Susan James, from Plane Stupid, said: “Mass deportations like the one we stopped tonight are immoral, unfair and illegal. I don’t want to stay silent in the face of mass deportations that are deliberately rushed and secretive.”
Since 2002, the Home Office has organised mass deportations on charter flights every few months. The flights are secretive and depart from undisclosed locations in the middle of the night.
People are given little notice of their removal, often meaning they have just a few days to fight for their right to stay. Cuts to legal aid mean that those with children or partners in the UK who have valid human rights-based claims to stay cannot access free legal help and often cannot afford to pay private lawyers to fight their cases.
Last year, more than 1,536 people were deported from the UK on charter flights to Albania, Jamaica, Pakistan, Nigeria and Ghana.
Home Office figures show last year over 50% of people who were put on charter flights were taken off after last-minute legal challenges.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We do not comment on operational activity. We respect everyone’s right to peaceful protest but we are clear that removal is an essential element of an effective immigration system.
“We expect those with no legal basis to remain in the UK to leave voluntarily but if they do not, we will seek to enforce their departure.”
See also: Why did Plane Stupid chain themselves to the runway at Stansted Airport?
Why did Plane Stupid chain themselves to the runway at Stansted Airport?
![29-02-2017-stansted-action-590.jpg [Related Image]](https://newint.org/blog/2017/03/29/29-02-2017-stansted-action-590.jpg)
”Just over a year ago we were convicted for our part in the Heathrow 13 action. We occupied the Northern runway at Heathrow, cancelling 25 flights, saving hundreds of tonnes of carbon dioxide from being emitted and protesting against the construction of the proposed third runway. For this we nearly went to prison.
So, why this move? Why is a well known environmental group now taking action against mass deportations?
Well, as Audre Lourde says, ‘there’s no such thing as a single issue campaign, because we do not live single issue lives.’ We do not see ourselves as ‘environmentalists’, nor do we see the fight against airport expansion or the fight against climate change as isolated from any other issue. Airport expansion is a form of violence and a form of oppression, one that a minority of people will benefit from the profits, whilst countless people will suffer from loss of community and health, both locally and globally.
As Black Lives Matter clearly stated back in September, the climate crisis is a racist crisis as it is Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies feel the worst effects of this violence. Oppressions are connected and the different forms it takes often share common roots. These roots include capitalism, racism, hetero-patriarchy and colonialism.
Migration and borders cannot be seen as separate to any of this. As Harsha Walia so eloquently outlines in Undoing Border Imperialism, borders are not mere things, they are part of a process of exploitation and displacement. This is very clear when we consider how different the rules are for corporations. Businesses are free to cross the globe at will, extracting resources, using cheap, or even slave labour, leaving behind environmental disaster, making profit and dodging tax and responsibility along the way. People who happen to have the wrong documents, the wrong nationality or skin tone are violently attacked for trying to cross these borders.
Mass deportations closely link to the ongoing process of colonialism. But so does airport expansion. Just as Heathrow is given a green light to build a new runway and drive climate chaos, corporations like Shell have been free to exploit the oil fields of the Niger Delta for decades. Through this they have caused as much oil spills each year as the Deepwater Horizon disaster, caused a health crisis from water contamination, murdered activists such as Ken Saro Wiwa and also been a major driver of climate chaos.
Yet, when people from this region seek a better life here in the UK, a country that benefits from the cheap oil that Shell provides, they are distrusted about their eligibility if seeking asylum and violently deported on mass. Profit for corporations, environmental destruction, and racist migration and asylum processes are all tied together in a insidious web. As Wretched of the Earth succinctly put it ‘Your Climate Profits Kill’ and they do so in a myriad of ways.
With such intertwined roots, we cannot stop the climate crisis without stopping the processes of colonialism that corporations are engaged in or without stopping the racist deportations that the UK government carries out to facilitate this process. To attempt to do otherwise is blind optimism at best or whitewashed environmentalism at worst.
Of course, there are even more direct links between these issues. There are companies like Tascor and Capita that are directly involved in this violence and direct profit from it. These companies are getting rich, charging vast amounts of money to facilitate this violence.
This is a violence that sees people getting their arm broken on transit, a violence that kills people like Jimmy Mubenga. These companies get away with this because they do their work in the shadows. We aimed to shine a light on this process, making them face up to their actions and take responsibility for it.
Above all, however, the main reason we did this was because we were asked to. We have direct contact with people affected by this particular charter flight, who feared for their lives if they were sent to Nigeria and Ghana last night. Acting in solidarity and as allies to these people, we took their lead, as they are the ones most directly affected by this violence. We hope that our action prevented these cases from happening, but also that it acts as a catalyst in the campaign to end charter flights once and for all.
Whilst the world may be turning it’s attention to the racist misogynist in the White House, let’s not forget that our own house is far from in order, that the legacy of colonialism and racism is long lasting and that we need to take action here and now.
You can start by signing this petition to UK Prime Minister Theresa May.”
The Free 