Post by sunnyemma on May 14, 2009 13:20:33 GMT -1
From the UNITY centre:
In a shocking move the Home Ofice Enforcement Team at Brand Street have carried out an unexpected dawn raid on a young mother from the Ivory Coast who had been living in Sighthill.
The dawn raid, the first to be carried out in Glasgow for almost a year, was carried out only days after the Home Office announced the start of a pilot project designed to prevent the need to detain asylum seeking families at all.
Fatou Felicite Gaye, a 38 year old single mum who has lived in Scotland since 2005, was woken up by immigration officials early this morning. She was detained with her four year old son, Arouna, who was born in Scotland, and the pair are now in Dungavel facing forced removal from the country on Monday 18 May.
Arouna will be the 21st child detained in Dungavel since the beginning of the year that Unity has found out about. It is not the first time the four year old or his mother have been treated in this way. Fatou, who receives counselling from the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture due to the trauma she experienced in her country of origin, was previously dawn raided in June last year and managed to successfully stop Home Office attempts to forcibly remove her then.
Only on Tuesday this week Fatou had been to report at the Home Office and campaigners at Unity are wondering why on earth the Home Office decided to use such heavy-handed and unnecessary tactics to detain Fatou this morning.
As a single mum with a young son Fatou is low on the list of people who are expected to abscond. She would however be high on the list of people who would have benefitted from taking part in the Alternatives to Detention project launched this week. When the start of the project was announced on Tuesday, Phil Taylor, regional director of the UKBA, was quoted in The Times newspaper asserting that dawn raids were only used when "all other avenues were exhausted" and that "We only detain families as a last resort".
Clearly Mr Taylor cannot be believed and seems to feel that young women and small children should be traumatised early in the morning to show how eactly how 'robust' he and his collegues are.
Perhaps the Glasgow Immigration Enforcement Team were unpset about being told to put away their shackles, battering rams and other door-smashing impliments for the forseeable future.
UNITY are calling for a protest outside the Home Office from 10.00am tomorrow. Please circulate this call out as far and as widely as possible.