The Children’s Commissioner has found that at least 15,000 children growing up in the UK live without a parent because the right of British citizens to reunite with a foreign spouse is limited by an unreasonable income threshold, an impossibly complicated application system fraught with Home Office errors, and no legal aid for families to challenge incorrect decisions. Parents and children alike suffer mental trauma, with symptoms including nightmares, eating disorders and aggression, while relationships are severely strained, often to the point at which children no longer recognise their parents. Children like Elijah, whose father was unable even to be present for Elijah’s birth. Families just like yours and mine. May’s government has repeatedly advised families that they are free to use Skype, and therefore this enforced separation does not constitute a violation of their right to a family life, while pledging to tighten these restrictions in its manifesto last year.
Elsewhere in the system, unaccompanied young refugees are unable to be safely reunited with their families, despite calls from the Red Cross and the United Nations to open channels. Three unaccompanied teenagers seeking asylum in the UK and facing indefinite separation from their familieskilled themselves in the six months from last November. A private member’s bill seeking to allow family reunion in limited circumstances was introduced by the SNP’s Angus MacNeil in 2017. Yet despite cross-party support, a parliamentary debate in March saw the government refusing to support a very limited measure of relief, with the Conservative MP Ranil Jayawardena going out of his way to use the words “refugee” and “migrant” interchangeably, and invoking the threat of terrorism as a reason to prevent the reunion of a few hundred rigorously screened children with their parents.
Unaccompanied children are routinely detained on arrival in the UK, with more than a thousand, including babies, detained at Heathrow airport last year. And in a chilling parallel to the horrors unfolding in the US, the charity Bail for Immigration Detainees has documented hundreds of cases involving families forcibly separated by immigration detention, with children often put into unstable care arrangements or placed at serious risk of harm. These cases often involve the shameful practice of indefinite detention, with the UK the only country in Europe that still locks vulnerable people up for administrative convenience, without a time limit or a clear plan. In most of these cases, parents are ultimately released, their detention having served no real purpose save the permanent damage done to their families.
The prime minister is right to condemn the actions of the Trump administration. For her words to mean anything, however, she must look closer to home and rethink her own decisions that have driven a wedge between families while denying them the ability to challenge their separation.
Theresa May’s brutal family separations would make Trump blush | Satbir Singh
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