contribution by Salman Shaheen

Iraqi immigrant, Dana Ali, faces deportation after an alleged Home Office blunder failed to recognise his marriage to a British citizen.

One day, Dana Ali didn’t come home. When he turned up at the police station on July 31st, they took him into custody without warning. “I asked them why and they told me they had papers to remove me from the United Kingdom,” Dana says.

“I haven’t been home since that day.” Dana has barely seen his wife since they took him to Oakington, the Cambridgeshire immigrant detention centre exposed by a 2005 BBC documentary for the violence and racist abuse carried out by some of its staff.

“He’s had to see a doctor and a psychiatrist since he’s been there. On one of his arms, he started scratching his skin to bits. He doesn’t realise he’s doing it, he’s so stressed. They’ve put him on anti-depressants, which took over a week for him to get. Even the doctor said she’s disgusted at how he’s being treated,” says Taina.

Background
Dana Ali was born in 1975. He grew up in Halabja, the Kurdish town in northern Iraq that the world first heard about on March 16th 1988 when 5,000 people were massacred by Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons.

“Many of my family died in that attack,” Dana tells me. It is little wonder, then, that he became a vocal critic of Saddam’s government. “When I grew up, I began supporting the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq,” he says. Dana would distribute leaflets and newspapers for the party. That was how he came to the attention of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, an Islamist group that held power in the region.

Fearing for his life, Dana fled to the UK in July 2000. After being granted a work permit, he found a job at Buxted Chicken Factory in Suffolk. It was there that he met his wife, Taina Mason.

Dana moved to Lowestoft to live with Taina and they married in 2003, the year that Britain and America invaded Iraq, Saddam’s regime fell and the Islamists in the Kurdish north were crushed.

Problems begin
Dana applied for a marriage visa, but an apparent mix-up of papers by the Home Office has left him facing deportation. “At first they approved my application,” Dana says. “Then they said my leave to remain paper was a mistake because my file had been mixed up with someone else. They told me to go home and wait 3-6 months.”

After a couple of years, they just refused me.” As a result, Dana was forced to leave his job at the chicken factory. He has been out of work since 2004, unable to claim benefits and unable to help his wife with the mortgage, living in the country pending immigration investigation and forced to sign in at the police station every month.

“I’m being treated like a criminal,” Dana says. In the past, the British government treated the country’s poor as though they were criminals. Now that status is accorded to its immigrants. Dana has lost a lot of weight since his detention. Hearing about his experiences, it is not hard to imagine Oakington as some kind of Dickensian workhouse. “When we go for dinner, if you ask for one more piece of bread, they won’t give it to you. When I’ve complained, I’ve been told, I’m illegal in this country, I shouldn’t be here, why am I asking questions? This camp, the way they treat you, it’s somewhere else, it’s not England.”

Dana desperately wants to return to his wife. “There are many people here in the same situation,” he says. “They’ve been here for a long time, and they’re married, and they just want to work and get on with their lives and their families. Some of them have kids as well.”

Having once again submitted his documentation to the Home Office, Dana is awaiting their response. Taina says that if they do not recognise their marriage and his eligibility to remain in the country, she will take the case to the High Court.

“I spoke to my solicitor and he said if we go to the High Court it will probably cost £5,000 to get him free,” she says. “Where is the justice in this world if you have to pay for someone’s freedom?”

Dana’s life story, from his fight against Islamists in Halabja to his fight to remain in Britain, is testament to the fact that the price of freedom can be very high indeed.

Dana’s niece Claire has set up a Facebook group in support of their campaign to raise awareness.

——–
A longer version of this article is at The Third Estate, where it was first published.

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