Send this letter to the Home Office NOW!!

This is the letter for everyone to send ASAP!! Spread the word!!

Rt Honourable Alan Johnson, MP
Secretary of State for the Home Office
3rd Floor, Peel Buildings
2 Marsham St, London SW1 4DF

Fax: 020 8760 3132
Email: UKBApublicenquiries@UKBA.gsi.gov.uk

Dear Home Secretary

I am writing to ask you to grant leave to remain, with the right to work, to the SOAS cleaners, Marina Silva, who has claimed asylum and Rosa de Perez who are currently being held in Yarl’s Wood IRC. We are deeply concerned that five of their colleagues were deported within 48 hours of the raid on SOAS, without any chance to put their case for being granted the right to stay and in some cases breaking up family relationships.

Marina and Rosa are two of the nine cleaners who were arrested in a raid by around 40 officers of the Border Agency on Friday 12th June 2009, on campus at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). They are charged with overstaying visas—but both women have had good reasons to enter the UK and an urgent need to work to support themselves and their families. Both have worked hard for ISS, a company that is notorious for exploiting migrant labour, for low wages.

Marina is sixty-three years old. She is from Bolivia and her husband was killed in an honour killing after which she was threatened and harassed until she was forced to leave her home. She has been living in the UK for several years and has made a life here. She is ill and was due a hospital appointment on the day of the raid. She has now made an application to stay to be safe and to live in dignity in the UK. These women are not criminals, they are hard working people on low pay who have worked to pay their bills and support their family in the dirty and undignified job as a cleaner. I believe that they should not be treated as criminals.

While Rosa has not sought to resist removal, she will be returned to extreme poverty in Nicaragua and will be unable to support her family—having four children who in the economic crisis of her home country have no other means of support. She will be unemployed when returned. She is in urgent need of the compassion to allow her, now she is here, the ability to stay and to work to support her children and I would ask for a work permit to allow her to continue to work, but in dignity.

While I recognize that their overstay was unlawful, the manner of their detainment at SOAS was shockingly aggressive, disproportionate, deceiving and unnecessary. The cleaning company, which employs the cleaners, ISS, had collaborated with the UK Border Agency to arrest the workers through the pretence of an “emergency staff meeting” at 6.30am on Friday 12th June. Once 40 officers, dressed in riot gear, were hidden around the meeting and managers barred exit during the first part of the meeting before the immigration officers pounced on workers. The SOAS campus was sealed off while workers were locked in a room, and then questioned one by one in an adjacent room. Union representatives trying to bring water and aid to their members—including a woman more than six months pregnant—were denied access and not allowed to provide any legal aid for their members, who should have had the right to a solicitor.

I am very concerned about these workers who were employed by ISS, a company that had just been forced to grant union recognition and to pay the London Living Wage to its cleaners working in SOAS. I am especially concerned that the raid took place on the very morning on which cleaners were to rally in support of their sacked UNISON trade union branch chair, who was also an ISS employee. Rosa and Maria are just two of the thousands of migrant workers, refugee and asylum seekers who make a valuable contribution to our society. Like so many who work unsocial hours for low pay, they are making a valuable contribution to society, and they should not be punished and hunted like criminals for this.

I am deeply concerned at what appears to be UKBA officials being used to discipline workers in the process of unionising and appeal for permission to stay and work to be granted to the SOAS workers. All of these people are working and supporting themselves as well as paying taxes and national insurance contributions. You will be aware of the research which shows the greater than average economic contribution of working migrants who are single and without dependents in the UK.

I therefore urge you to: --Release Marina and Rosa on bail immediately and give consideration to our appeal for a grant of leave to remain to these workers. In Marina’s case to grant humanitarian protection ~ in Rosa’s case to grant a work visa. --To allow those SOAS cleaners who have been deported to renter the country for reasons of family reunion and to work. --To make clear that no person should be raided and held in such a way in the future, without water, medicine or the right to be seen by representatives wishing to provide legal assistance. I would welcome an urgent response as these workers have only days before removal directions. I look forward to hearing from you on the matters I have raised above.

Yours sincerely
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