We can debate whether charter flights are moral – but what about the impact on families?

A 12-year-old girl brought a room of adults close to tears this week when she read out a letter about the impact of immigration controls against her father.

“Imagine waking up at 5am to flashing lights and a very loud banging noise at the door,” she said. “Imagine seeing 20 to 30 men rushing into your home just for one man. Having to say bye to my dad when he’s in handcuffs just hurts my heart. It’s like immigration doesn’t want my family to succeed.”

During a meeting at the Jamaican High Commission, the child – surrounded by her three sisters, the youngest just a toddler, and mother – delivered a moving testimony that shed light on the impact of immigration control on families.

The meeting took place two weeks after a charter flight taking 29 individuals from the UK to Jamaica prompted outrage in the wake of the Windrush scandal. Commissioner Seth George Ramocan organised the gathering in the hope that it would help inform discussions about how they cooperate with the Home Office on future deportations.

But there was little discussion about policy or intergovernmental cooperation. From the outset, the meeting was highly charged with emotion, with relatives giving heart-rending accounts of having their loved ones “snatched” from them and sent against their will to a country that, often, they barely knew or remembered.

The mother of one man who was on the charter flight – after coming to the UK aged 11 – explained how her son had arrived in Jamaica with no one to care for him, and made a passionate plea that “all of our children who came here when they were young should be here. This is degrading. Our children need to come back.”

With so many relatives already driven to despair and desperation over the Home Office’s treatment of their loved ones, there was little the commissioner could say to temper them. It was clear that they had little faith in anything he said.

This comes as no surprise when you consider that many of these people have suffered years of fear and hopelessness at the hands of the British government, despite never being subjected to immigration control themselves.

We can debate the use of charter flights and the wider hostile environment as forms of immigration control, but whether enough attention is paid to the indirect devastation this has on their loved ones is another question.