The grassroots resistance to immigration raids is picking up, up and down this island.
May 5 2022: the Home Office are sent packing in Nicholson Square, Edinburgh after a raid targeting a restaurant. See this write-up in Freedom News.
May 14 2022: cops targeting Deliveroo drivers face a huge upsurge of community resistance, which helped some drivers get away in the hubbub.
June 11 2022: a neighbour was detained in Peckham, but had to be released from the immigration van after a multi hour stand-off with hundreds of local residents. See this write-up in Open Democracy.
We also received the following from a local Peckham resident Illa, about what happened on the ground:
Yesterday, our communities in South East London and London-wide showed up and demonstrated what solidarity looks like. At 11 am, I witnessed 2 immigration enforcement vans parked outside my building. 8 immigration enforcement officers enter my building at Queens Road Peckham (London) with tasers, and a ram to bash doors open. A friend came with me and we both stood by the door where police had congregated waiting for the opportunity to talk to my neighbour inside. We overheard how officers were hurrying him, telling him that if he couldn’t find any shoes to wear they would take him barefoot. As they detained and handcuffed him, they blocked all exits and we were violently pushed away so as to not be able to talk to him, follow him or give him a solicitors’ number.
As calls for support were shared on Twitter, organisers from local solidarity networks came to the area. We then started to see neighbours standing by the parking lot, linking arms and blocking the exit of the immigration enforcement van. By the first hour, 10 people had gathered and after the fourth-hour, hundreds were singing ‘would you let him go’ in the melody of DJ Otzi’s song ‘hey baby’. Neighbours with babies and their children joined the chants and danced together. We collectively cared for each other, sharing water, and ice lollies; jokes were made about bringing a BBQ to the parking lot, as we were going to wait for as long as necessary to get our neighbour released.
After a few hours, we insisted to the officers that our neighbour had been locked inside the van for more than 5 hours at 25C with no access to food or a toilet. Chants became stronger and the police started to aggressively push the crowd, stepping on protestors, pulling their hair and kicking them whilst they were on the floor. Finally, after 7 hours since the start of the raid, they announced that our neighbour would be released. The crowd of 200+ protestors was overjoyed. This is what mutual aid looks like: communities coming together to resist racist deportations.
I then remembered that officers insisted on asking why we were defending a person committing a crime since he was an “illegal” in the UK. Migration is not a crime. What is a crime is Priti Patel’s plan to create offshore detention centers in Rwanda; what is a crime is supplying £17bn in UK arms to countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel who force Yemenis and Palestinians into exile; a crime is creating flows of climate refugees because of the UK’s mining activities in the Global South; the crime is the UK’s impunity over thousands of deaths in the English channel. Yesterday’s anti-raid victory may seem small but it is a step in acknowledging people’s power to overcome social injustice.
For any future people who want to build on the songs sung in these resistances, two examples were:
- From DJ Otzi’s “Hey Baby”:
🎵 Heeeeeeeey-ey baaabeeeeey (oooh, aah) I wanna knooooow-oooow-ooow when you’ll let him go.
- From 3 Of A Kind’s “Babycakes”:
🎵 Baby cakes, we just don’t know (know)
When you (you) are gonna let him go (go)
Good luck in the struggle <3
A few other pieces of press that resistance to immigration raids have had:
