A charter flight is scheduled to depart from London at 06:30hrs on Wednesday September 7th for JAMAICA.  This is the first charter flight to Jamaica since 6th November 2014. Charter flights are privately chartered ghost flights that leave from an undisclosed location early in the morning, private security guards enforce the removals with no public present. On the basis of previous charter flight reports from London, it is assumed the company contracted to operate this flight is Titan Airways. Charter flights cost on average over £200,000 per flight.

Unity has been speaking with over 50 Jamaican individuals, currently detained across the UK’s immigration detention estate. These people are set to be forcibly removed on Wednesday morning.

In the last few weeks, hundreds of individuals previously released on bail and temporary admission have been detained, in a deliberate act to prepare for this charter flight to Jamaica. Many individuals have ongoing immigration cases and most cannot afford to pay the huge legal fees to regularise their stay. Everyone we have spoken to has been here since they were children and have no family or friends in Jamaica. Their lives are here in the UK. Everyone we have spoken to has British family, children and partners, even grandchildren and extended family.

People in immigration detention are asking that their voices are heard. They want the public to know that they were racially profiled and strategically detained in order to fill this charter flight, without consideration of their individual circumstances .  They want people to understand that this charter flight will be tearing families apart.

People issued tickets for the charter flight on Wednesday have complied with the conditions imposed on them by the Home Office. They have succumbed to the Home Office's every demand and now feel like they have been tricked and kidnapped. Each person told the same story – they went to sign at the Home Office reporting centre as required and were tricked. They were told that they must have a quick interview and taken into a room, 3 hours later they were detained. One man even told of his friend who had attended the reporting centre with his baby in a pushchair. The Home Office called social services to pick up the baby and detained the father.

Everyone we spoke to came to the UK as a child. One friend came here aged 4. All bar one person has British children. One man has been married to a British national for 12 years. Two of the men are full time carers to their partners. The Home Office maintain that family relationships can be maintained via phone, email and Skype. Ray (not his real name) previously stated: “Immigration Judges tell us we can maintain our family life over Skype. But how can you take your child to school through Skype? How can you have a relationship with your wife over Skype?”

In the afternoon, detainees are taken (often with force) from detention, handcuffed, and put onto coaches bound for the airport. “Reserve” detainees are kept on coaches, unaware if they are being put on the plane or not until after the flight has actually left – demonstrating the Home Office’s clear emphasis on filling the flight regardless of the legal merit of detainees’ individual cases. Standard practice is that each person facing removal is accompanied by two security guards (contracted to companies such as Tascor and G4S); so, for a flight forcibly removing 80 people, there would be 160 guards present. Handcuffed detainees are forced onto the plane under the threat of violence, often with unnecessary and excessive wrist and waist restraint belts, which are often kept on continuously for the whole journey, with head restraints for those who attempt to resist (brought in following the death of Jimmy Mubenga in 2010). One independent report found that the use of waist restraints, which circulate around the entire body and hold one’s hands and arms firmly by one side, even fails to comply with Home Office guidelines of exceptional circumstances – but have instead become routine.

Let us be clear, this is collective expulsion. The people set to fly on Wednesday are not those with particularly weak cases, they’ve been rounded up because they’re Jamaican. These people have nobody in Jamaica and nowhere to go when they touch down in Kingston. They will be torn from families leaving wives and children behind.

These people are carers to partners, fathers to children, members of communities. The UK is their home. Black lives don’t matter to this government. The legacy of this punitive regime will breed nothing but broken families, more crime and hate. Some of these men are angry. How can anyone blame them. Charter flights are short-sighted, racist, cost ineffective and callous.