The last days have seen activist groups and local community members team up across the UK in solidarity with migrants, after the Home Office announced on Sunday that a country-wide operation to detain migrants ahead of removal to Rwanda would be taking place.

Various forms of solidarity and direct action took place, with migrant and refugee solidarity groups managing to quickly organise a number of blockades across the country in response to the police rounding up people for transfer to the Bibby Stockholm. While most of these actions consisted of peaceful attempts to blockade coaches, there were flare-ups of violence after aggressive police officers attacked migrant solidarity protesters and locals. Most notable was the resistance action in Peckham which saw local community members and activists team up to successfully prevent a coach holding people to be deported from leaving. But Thursday’s protests also saw people descend upon the government’s immigration offices at Lunar House in Croydon and resistance actions also took place at Eaton House in Hounslow.

The Peckham action received the most amount of media attention, however, after the police attacked the demo and arrested forty-five people with one person requiring medical attention at the scene. The police also reported arresting a person who was not part of the protest for an alleged racially aggravated public order offence after video footage posted online seemed to show the driver of the coach calling a protester a “black bastard”.

With the government hoping to start its deportation flights to Rwanda as early as July, active resistance may have to continue over the following weeks. But we are already seeing some early success with the resistance in Peckham also preventing the coach from being able to pick up more people on route to Portsmouth as had been planned, protest action in Margate also resulted in the Home Office quietly stating that they would be abandoning plans to move refugees from there to the Bibby Stolkholm in Portsmouth.

~ Sam Skelt