‘It was like my life was over from that point’: Life after deportation

I’ve been down here nearly nine years now,” George Tulloch, 59, tells me in a raspy, verging-on-upbeat tone as a cockerel crows on the other end of the phone. He’s living in his late father’s home in the small, rural town of Linstead in the St Catherine parish of Jamaica, where he found himself living after being deported from the UK in 2012. Though he was born in Jamaica, having spent his childhood there before coming to the UK at the age of 14, Tulloch spent the majority of his life in Bristol – until the upheaval of being deported from the UK changed his life forever. 

After almost a decade back home, which has meant leaving his mother, children and extended family behind, the pain that he endured through years of being detained – and eventually, removed – is still palpable. But there’s also a sense of acceptance within him, if only that things are unlikely to change.

“My mind is clear and I’m on the right path, that’s how I’ve survived up here today. Most guys who come down like me, they end up dead the next day, or [after] a week,” he says, referencing the thousands of other people who’ve been forcibly returned to Jamaica from the UK in the past few years – many of whom face destitution with little support on arrival.

Read More:

“They come down with the English style and the English style can’t work here because this is Jamaica,” Tulloch continues, warning that being able to adapt is key to the survival of forced returnees who have few options available to them. “Otherwise you’re going to stand out.”

Like many others who have been removed from the UK on criminal deportation flights, Tulloch’s battle to remain in the UK took him by complete surprise. His status came into question in 2008 after he was sentenced to a month in prison for driving while disqualified. After two weeks in Bristol’s Horfield prison, he was told there were issues with his immigration status and that he needed to be held in the prison for a longer period of time. It was news that came to him like a blow to the back of the head. “Oh, I nearly fainted, man,” Tulloch tells me with a sharp intake of breath, almost as if it’s all happening again. 

open image in gallery

“It was like my life was over from that point,” he continues, telling me of the remaining four years he’d go on to spend in the Dover Immigration Removal Centre, Brook House Immigration Removal Centre and, finally, Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre, the last place he was sent before being flown back to Jamaica against his will. After enduring what at the time felt like an endless cycle, the monotony and cruel surroundings of the centres he’d spent almost half a decade in became too much to bear. “They break you to surrender,” he says. “I did another year [at Colnbrook] and I said, you know what? I’m not doing no more of this stuff because it’s like murder. It’s better I come home.” Accepting his fate, Tulloch then made plans to live in his friend’s mother’s guest house in Negril, Jamaica. But the night before his friend, also detained at Colnbrook, was removed, the main house burned down - meaning there was no room for him after all. A week later, Tulloch was on board a flight, saying goodbye to his family.

Because of the short notice, Tulloch tells me that when he arrived, he couldn’t change arrangements and had to “stay in a hotel for a month. So the little money I had personally, just burned up from the beginning.” After a stint staying with friends in different parts of the country, Tulloch’s sister and father decided to take him in, an option not everyone has.

When I probe him a little more about the challenges of everyday living, Tulloch, torn between being thankful for his natural surroundings and having no choice but to piece together the fragments of his life, tells me that “the weather alone is good, you know?”

“But it’s been tough out here”, he admits.

Though the allure of lush green hills, white sandy beaches and sun-kissed skin could seem appealing enough to those of us who don’t know the horrors of the immigration removal process, they’re of little comfort when you have nothing to your name. Even less when you’ve been returned to a country that you haven’t set foot in for years. Unfortunately, that’s the situation for many of the thousands of people who’ve faced the traumatic upheaval of being deported to Jamaica from the UK in the last 20 years. Though circumstances vary, for many of these people (some of whom have been facing legal battles with the Home Office for years) stepping back onto Jamaican soil has only begot uncertainty – and in many cases, hostility too.

open image in gallery

The “deportee phenomenon”, in part, shows why. Coined by the late Bernard Headley, a criminologist at the University of West Indies, it describes the idea that those deported back to their country of origin are criminally inclined, posing dangerous threats to residents by way of their very presence. These attitudes largely stem from the emergence of social anxieties about fast rising crime on the island, most notably from the Nineties onwards, when the murder rate soared to over 40 murders per 100,000 people. Since then, animosity towards these forcibly returned people has escalated too, with government bodies and the media alike often accused of fanning the flames. 

But is this moral outrage rooted in fact? Perhaps not. Of all Jamaicans returned through deportation (mostly from the UK, the US and Canada) between 1996 and 2014, “criminal deportees” only made up 2 per cent of the population. In fact, according to a 2014 study from Jamaica’s National Intelligence Bureau, only 4 per cent of all “criminal deportees” reoffended after being returned, a concerning, yet considerably low proportion given how pervasive fears around deportee-related crime are.

Doreen Gohagen, 57, didn’t think she’d still be in Jamaica four years after being deported from the UK in 2017. A soft-spoken woman with dreams of working in care, she first came to London on a student visa in 2002 studying health and social care at an east London college. But after a mix-up with her visa application at the Home Office, she soon found herself fighting to stay in the place she’d long called home. Her solicitor at the time challenged the decision and applied for discretionary leave to remain. After an initial refusal, the Home Office then said it would look into Gohagen’s case. It would be five years until she heard anything, until the joint intervention of her local MP Jim Dowd and solicitor finally led to a reply. “They wouldn’t answer until the MP got in touch with them,” Gohagen says, adding that the Home Office apologised for the delay and reassured her that “if they needed anything from me they would get in touch with me”. 

open image in gallery

But despite being told her case would be considered under the legacy scheme (created to handle a backlog of hundreds of thousands of unresolved immigration and asylum cases made before March 2007), nothing came to fruition. By 2009, her college went into liquidation and the Home Office refused her leave to remain. “They said they were giving me the right of appeal but I must go home to Jamaica to appeal my case,” Gohagen tells me, still frustrated that despite errors on the Home Office’s end and assistance from her local MP Ellie Reeves, it happened anyway. A statement from Reeves says: “As Doreen’s former member of parliament, I made representations to the immigration minister on her behalf in November 2017, which led to her removal being deferred. However MPs’ powers in immigration matters are limited and despite Doreen having legal representatives acting for her as well as the involvement of an MP, her application was ultimately refused. I was very sorry to see that after living in the UK for many years the Home Office still refused Doreen the right to settle here and for the impact this had on her wellbeing.” 

Administrative issues like these seemed to frustrate the process of securing Gohagen’s right to remain in the UK at every turn. She tells me: “The first time that I went to report [to the Home Office], by the end of the week I got a letter saying that I did not report and that there would be a criminal charge against me, or a fine. I went in and told them and the manager for that department told me [the letter] was wrong. They made a big mistake.” Issues like these, from the loss or confiscation of documents, to the enforcement of confusing loopholes that see people trapped in endless appeals against the Home Office, have become well known in cases like Gohagen’s, with many left to await outcomes indefinitely.

open image in gallery

Since being forcibly returned to Jamaica, Gohagen is still caring for people – this time, however, for her extended family members. But even with support from her family, getting by is anything but easy. Though Gohagen’s experiences have been difficult – her stints in immigration removal centres amounted to well over a year in total, and since returning, she’s suffered the deaths of close family members – her modest, God-fearing nature holds her back from complaining too much at one time. “Well, you know, I’m giving thanks,” she tells me over the phone when I ask how she’s coping with the death of her mother, following complications with her kidney and her heart. “It’s getting harder, it’s a bit rough but what can I do?”

Gohagen is by no means in an ideal situation. But, unlike many deportees, she’s had permanent residence for a number of years. Others aren’t quite so fortunate. According to Jamaica’s Ministry of Local government around 2,000 people in Jamaica currently experience homelessness. Though exact figures for the proportion of deported people among that population aren’t widely known, the risk of homelessness is an increasingly significant concern for many of those who’ve been forcibly returned.

In fact, the two issues have become increasingly intertwined since deportations from the UK ramped up significantly in the early 2000s. Since 2006, the Open Arms centre, a Kingston-based charity that houses deportees and homeless people, has served as the first home a selection of deportees with no other means of accommodation will know. Usually housed in individual rooms (while homeless residents tend to be placed in dormitories), the centre claims to take people through processes of “rehabilitation, reintegration and resettlement”. But the situation may well be more complicated. As scholar Luke de Noronha, author of Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica observes, services like Open Arms tend to belong to a complex network of funding that essentially works as a “site of humanitarian bordering”. In other words, it’s part and parcel of the removal process - paid for in part by the Jamaican government and the UK aid budget.

As he observes: “The UK does not fund Open Arms out of goodwill, but primarily to facilitate deportation. Open Arms is regularly cited by the Home Office to justify sending people back to Jamaica when they have no family connections or means of social support on the Island.”

open image in gallery

When I spoke to Open Arms’s director, Yvonne Brown, she confirmed that although the centre has multiple funding sources, it does receive subsidies from “the British High Commission” because it has “an agreement to take in involuntary returnees from England”.

Brown, herself a British citizen who worked as a community mental health nurse until moving back to Jamaica for retirement, maintains that the programmes offered to residents (who she refers to as “participants”) of Open Arms help tremendously with easing people into Jamaican society. According to Brown, around 40 per cent of “participants” currently in the Open Arms centre are “from England, Canada and America”, which amounts to the equivalent of around 18 out of 45 people at half capacity. She claims that although the centre is running at half capacity due to the pandemic, the proportion is “quite high because you know, Jamaicans are everywhere. So when they come, we accept them with open arms.” But while the centre itself hosts an array of training services, including barbering, electrical installations and even learning how to navigate an apiary, there’s no guarantee that residents will fare well when they do leave, nor that society will welcome them.

Oswald Dawkins is director of the National Organisation of Deported Migrants, another charity that was supported by the British government (specifically, the Home Office) for seven years until it pulled funding days before the launch of the Windrush compensation scheme in 2019. That move alone was enough to make things difficult for his organisation, forcing it to pivot to offering a skeleton service, which it still struggles to do, and eventually losing its official website not long after. He believes that the pairing of a lack of support and negative perceptions about deportees can work to make things that much harder for many. Especially in the wake of several murders of homeless people earlier this year, reportedly committed by a deportee. 

open image in gallery

Though not everyone will profess to have been shaken by the news, it was widespread enough to play into the existing “cloud of fear and insecurity” around public safety in Jamaica, an issue human geography professor Margaret Byron says plays into the “foreign criminal” myth.

Brown from Open Arms believes there isn’t necessarily a higher sense of suspicion towards deportees as a result of the violence. “People go about their business,” she says. While Tulloch believes it’s a non-story, at most, the result of people being “careless” and “things happening to them”. The Jamaican prime minister and media, however, appear to feel differently, putting much more weight on the matter than would be expected for a seemingly small story. In the week after the killings, he said: “When I saw the news … like all Jamaicans I was deeply distraught,” before confirming that the police had “one suspect in custody” and that they were “a deportee”. 

In fact, numerous reports from Jamaican publications in response to violent incidents involving deportees tend to put extra emphasis on that status, using it as an identifier in the same way that many sections of the British press zero in on immigrants in relation to crime, for example. But there have been attempts to push back against these hostilities in the media, with a focus on encouraging the government to take more responsibility, or indeed, to refuse to comply with all aspects of the removal process. As argued in Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica, though the “Jamican government is obliged to accept its own nationals”, the same obligations do not apply to the “re-documentation process”, in which Jamaican authorities help the UK authorities to verify individuals as Jamaican nationals ahead of deportation. 

Read More:

Gohagen says that one of the biggest things she’s had to adjust to has been that “people expect more from you” as someone who has returned from England. And often “come looking for you to give them something to eat”, even if you don’t necessarily have it. Tulloch agrees, saying: “When you come [back to Jamaica] from England, they don’t care how you come back. They’re gonna say, ‘You never sent me pound, dollar, nothing. So now you’re here, you can’t ask me for nothing’.” As the UK’s immigration policy toughens to new extremes and  homelessness and violent crime continue to complicate matters for the Jamaican government, it’s unclear what lies ahead for those who have yet to be deported. But if one thing is certain, it’s that conversations around immigration need to focus more on what happens after people are flown thousands of miles away from the homes they once knew. Out of sight though they may be, there’s no reason that they should be out of mind too.