The Home Office has agreed to fly home a member of the Windrush generation who lived in the UK for 47 years before being wrongfully deported and forced to live on the streets of Kingston, Jamaica in horrific conditions for over a decade.
In a highly unusual move and after protracted legal action, Home Office officials have accepted that Winston Knight, 64, is a member of the Windrush generation and have agreed to revoke his deportation order.
Speaking to the Guardian from Kingston, Jamaica, Knight said he was delighted to finally be on his way back to the UK after more than a decade of enduring horrific conditions on the streets.
“I’m doing much better now I know I have won my case and will be returning to the UK. But I am coming from hell. I have been living in a war zone in Kingston and I’ve had some very tough days.”
He is likely to return to the UK in the coming weeks, possibly before Windrush Day on 22nd June, which celebrates the contribution Caribbean migrants and their families have made to the UK. It marks the date in 1948 that HMT Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex, bringing hundreds of passengers from the Caribbean to the UK.
Knight was deported from the UK in 2013 after he was convicted of stealing a piece of jewellery during the 2011 riots, in what his legal team described as an “opportunistic mistake”.
He arrived in 1966 aged only six, brought to the UK by people unrelated to him. He experienced a difficult childhood in south London, wasn’t allowed to attend school and later worked on construction sites. The lack of school and employment records made it difficult for him to prove he had been “ordinarily resident” in the UK in 1973.
Like all Citizens of the UK and Colonies – a status granted before 1983 – he was granted indefinite leave to remain. But his lawyers had to carry out painstaking work to track down witnesses who remembered him from his childhood and could corroborate his account of the time he arrived in the UK.
When he was illegally deported in 2013, the Windrush scandal revealed by the Guardian had not yet emerged. Knight said that he was so desperate when he was detained in Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, near Heathrow, about the prospect of being forcibly returned to a country he knew little of, that he repeatedly attempted suicide there.
