From afar, when you hear about a hostile environment, and when you see what’s going on with people like Trump and all these things, it’s not easy to even think about coming to a place like this. Back home, you hear people call the UK a hostile environment. I would have probably chosen another place, maybe. But nobody wants to meet their daughter for the first time like that. If she was to come in and prove that she is my daughter, maybe their report would have changed. But I didn’t want my daughter to see me in here, like a prisoner. The reason they were saying this is because Lily hadn’t come to see me. Has no family ties to the UK, and therefore would abscond if he got bail to be out of detention. That’s one of the things that they always wrote: I told them, ‘I have a family!’ But in the report they gave me, they wrote things like: The Home Office were using this against me. It scares me that I have never met my daughter. Now the guys inside are saying to me, ‘You’re good to go. I’ve never held her in my arms and told her that she will be safe in this world - that I will keep her safe. I have seen photographs of her, had little conversations with her on Skype, where she smiled and said a few words - whatever she could manage. By that time, I was no longer there.īeautiful Lily, sweet Lily, with the silent voice. But my mum’s request for asylum was denied and we had to leave and go back to our country of exile.īefore we left, though, I had a relationship and that resulted in my daughter being born a year later. Lots of my friends tried out and eventually did go. I wanted to get a scholarship to play American college soccer. I was trying to play football when I was a teenager, trying to be as good as I could. But she never really let me know about everything, not even about the asylum application. I just remember she was in pain because her brother died. But she didn’t fill me in on what was happening. Well, things were going on back home that I did not know about. Everybody knows you because you play footy. You know, your typical jock, playing football. The majority of the kids were Pakistani and Indian – they were running helter-skelter there! I even learnt to play cricket!īy the time I was seventeen, I was a very good sportsman. It’s only when I moved to another area in Manchester that things were different. Parents weren’t too worried about where their children were, they knew they were playing in the park with other children. When we were kids, we just walked outside, friendships started from there. In Manchester, at the time, it was so different from home. ‘Okay, go home and run them under cold-ish water.’ I told the PE teacher that my hands had gone blue and he said to me, She studied Developmental Science and Rural Development because she wanted to work with NGOs. The government had a programme where they sent people to England. I first came to the UK from X with my mother in 1998, when I was ten years old and she came for school. You’re in a cell for approximately twelve hours a day.īut the guys inside are saying to me, ‘Now look, you’re getting off. They lock your room at 9pm and open it at eight in the morning. You’re not really in prison, but that’s what it feels like. I got to chill for two days, Saturday and Sunday. If there is nothing negative in the letter, then you celebrate. We all get weekly reports about how we’ve behaved and whether the Home Office has turned against us. I was constantly fighting an invisible enemy. This is all I knew: they were trying to deport me. They say that you’re meant to spend a maximum of six months here and then you will have a review. The thing about detention is this: you don’t have a release date. They’ve been watching the emergency medical team when they come in, they watch them, and learn. It’s so bad that even the guys who are selling have learnt how to put people in the recovery position. It’s a strange place to be: there are fights, there are people high on drugs. Oddly enough, the security in this wing is comparable to a high security prison. She said, ‘Yeah but you don’t have a criminal record,’
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