Home Office failures to hand over files causing people to be wrongly detained and deported (Independent) (5 July 2019)

Public law director Toufique Hossain is quoted in the Independent’s article regarding the Home Office preventing access to justice because it is routinely failing to respond to requests to hand over files containing immigration histories of people targeted by immigration enforcement, leaving them unable to challenge its decisions and resulting in them being wrongly detained or even deported. Toufique described obtaining SARs (subject access requests) from the Home Office as an uphill battle and commented; “It takes lawyers being able to threaten the Home Office with judicial review proceedings to get them to do anything. The vast majority of people don’t have lawyers who can do that. It’s time-consuming and costly. This creates an unacceptable risk of delay and risks people being effectively denied access to justice. The court needs to give guidance on this or establish some guidance, because the Home Office are not sticking to their own rules. They’re continuously breaking them.”