A MASS deportation flight to Jamaica is scheduled to take place later this month, according to a leading campaigner.

This comes after The Voice reported in February, that campaigners speculated that the government may be considering delaying a charter flight to Jamaica because of Prince William and Kate’s Royal Caribbean Tour.

Karen Doyle, national organiser at Movement for Justice, said Jamaican nationals are currently being rounded up and detained at detention centres for the flight – which she believes will take place on May 18.

The detainees have not received official removal notices yet, but Ms Doyle said the actions so far have all the hallmarks of another “unjust” and “racist” deportation flight to Jamaica.

Speaking to The Voice, she said: “On two different pieces of paperwork it has been logged that they are being detained because of flight on May 18, but they haven’t received removal notices yet.”

Ms Doyle has spoken to nine Jamaican nationals so far. She said most of them are being held Brook House detention centre and suspects more people will be taken to Colnbrook detention centre today.

She said: “Six of the nine people I have spoken to came to the UK under the age of 12 and no one has left in twenty years.”

Ms Doyle is organising a protest to be held outside the Jamaica High Commission in London on May 11 and is urging them to act now, to ensure no one who arrived in the UK under the age of 12 is deported.

She said: “They have in the past said don’t put anyone who came under the age of 12 on the flight and they have in the past said not to send charter flights to Jamaica because of Covid.

“We know they can do something and intervene, so we are asking them not to take these flights – as these flight are fundamentally unjust and racist.

“Jamaica should not be cooperating with these flights, other countries don’t, other countries refuse, Jamaica should be refusing as well.

“It is great that everyone has been so inspired by the protests across the Caribbean about the monarchy and the demands for reparations, part of that surely has to be recognising the racism towards the diaspora community – which is endemic in British society and standing up for that community.

“We are saying stop the flights and we are also saying reinstate a permanent agreement that people who came to the UK as children should not be deported.

“There is no public appetite for that, if you were raised here from the age of four, you don’t know anything else.

“Jamaica was absolutely right to make that agreement for two previous flights but they need to insist that becomes permanent.

“Stand up for those young people who have been subjected to so much in their lives, let them have that next chance.”

She told The Voice, that she knows of 15 children so far, who have a parent that is currently detained and warned families and communities continue to be torn apart by charter flights.

“I think it is the nature of Jamaican migration, the connection to the Windrush and I think it is because the vast majority of people who are scheduled for deportation on these flights have been here for 20 years plus, and many have families and are part of communities going back decades” she explained.

She added: “So far, it looks like this flight is going to be full of people who came to the UK as children.

“They are people we went to school with, worked with and they fundamentally sound entirely British and that is what is so bizarre.

“The Jamaica charter flights highlight the inequality, just because you don’t have that passport, because you couldn’t afford to get it or you got into some trouble when you were a kid, means that person will never have the same rights as a white person with a passport.

“They will never get that second chance.”

Ms Doyle said one of the detainees she has spoken to has learning difficulties.

She said many of the those facing removal have stories that exposed the “lifelong racism” faced by black people in Britain.

She said: “These flights expose the lifelong racism, from school where many were expelled and put in pupil referral units.

“Then from that exclusion, they face being groomed, getting picked up by police, cautioned, and arrested and then put in prison.

“It’s a path that exposes racism at every stage.

“For drugs offences, black men are more likely to be given harsher sentences, it exposes the kind of racism of all of these institutions and that is why it touches a nerve with so many people.”

Ms Doyle also said the public need to galvanise and support an immigration amnesty to put an end to people being “stuck on an expensive hamster wheel constantly having to prove their right to be here.”

The Voice has contacted the Home Office for comment and they said:  “Those with no right to be in the UK, including foreign national offenders, should be in no doubt that we will do whatever is necessary to remove them.

“This is what the public rightly expects and why we regularly operate flights to different countries. Since January 2019, we have removed more than 10,000 foreign national offenders. 

 “The New Plan for Immigration will fix the broken immigration system and stop the abuse we are seeing by expediting the removal of those who have no right to be here.”

The Home Office also said they do not comment on operational matters and since January 2019, they have removed 10,017 foreign national offenders.