Action stations over deportation

Published on Tuesday 18 December 2007 21:07

DOZENS of activists blockaded immigration offices in Glasgow yesterday as part of a co-ordinated nationwide protest against the Home Office's deportation of asylum seekers.

Demonstrators began arriving at the centre in the city's Brand Street at 4:45am. Their numbers were soon swelled by other activists and working professionals and students from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Stirling.

The protesters set up a 15ft tripod to block the vehicle entrance of the building in an effort to prevent dawn raids. They also claimed to have stopped one dawn raid vehicle.

Three activists chained themselves to the gates but two were later removed by police.

One demonstrator was also positioned at the top of the tripod.

A spokeswoman for Strathclyde Police said two men and a woman had been arrested for breach of the peace during the Glasgow protest.

Mel Vegan, spokeswoman for the Unity Centre, one of a number of groups represented, said: "This is a nationwide protest against the practice of dawn raids and the structure of the immigration system in this country.

"We want Scotland and the UK to be a place that welcomes people who come to seek asylum rather than somewhere which persecutes people who have already suffered so much.

"I don't know how long we will be here. It's just for as long as it takes for the police to move us."

The Glasgow office was just one of a number of Home Office locations to be targeted by protesters early yesterday.

The campaign, loosely organised under the banner of the No Borders Network UK, also blockaded centres in Bristol, Portsmouth and Newcastle. A spokeswoman for the group said: "Government policy targets the most visible and the most vulnerable among those migrants that it sees as being undesirable and therefore fit for this form of administrative removal.

"The blacked-out vans are part of the forced removal of asylum seekers and their families who have been denied the right to stay in this country by an increasingly harsh legal system."

At the centre in Portishead, near Bristol, about 15 protesters blockaded the depot entrance with a car, and three people chained themselves to it.

In Portsmouth, ten protesters blockaded the immigration office at the international ferry port between 5am and 8:30am. A spokeswoman for the activists said they prevented an immigration van leaving to carry out a dawn raid.

A Border and Immigration Agency spokesman said: "We accept asylum can be an emotive issue and that people are entitled to peaceful protest.

"However, failed asylum seekers who have no right to remain in the country and who do not leave will be removed.

"The government will take a robust approach.

"This is done in the most sensitive way possible, treating those to be removed with courtesy and dignity."