Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter!

What a week. After calling an election for 4 July, the Prime Minister said that no flights to Rwanda would take off before the election. There is no reason to believe that we will have anything other than a Labour government following that election and they have already rightly said that they will not send anyone to Rwanda. It is therefore not possible to say that removal to Rwanda is in any way imminent at the moment, yet the Home Office has been unlawfully maintaining detention and as ever it has been left to lawyers to get people released (and hopefully, to pursue damages claims).

It is an important reminder that the policy is still (technically) alive and on the books, which means that the associated challenges are also continuing. The FDA’s judicial review is still listed for next week as far as I am aware, and an expedited timetable has been ordered in Asylum Aid’s case.

Elsewhere, the Home Office continues to do what it does best – telling a one year old born in the UK that she cannot switch from a visitor visa to a child dependent visa within the UK in order to “maintain the integrity of the immigration laws”.

Oh, and for anyone who missed it – guess who’s back? (it’s David Bolt).

On Free Movement, we have two new short online courses that are free for members, one on applications for Adult Dependent Relatives and another on applications for Victims of Domestic Abuse to reflect the new appendices for those. We have also updated our Appendix FM course to reflect those changes.

We have also launched a new webinar on best practice in family reunion applications. Our earlybird discount of 20% is available until Monday 3 June. We also still have some places left for our next OISC levels 1 and 2 live training courses in July. On 24 June 2024 I am running a small workshop on making change of conditions applications to lift the no recourse to public funds restriction from a person’s leave.

On the blog, I took a day out from the beach to write up the latest quarterly statistics. There were also case round ups covering citizenship deprivation, electronic monitoring and curtailment among others. For today, I wrote up a useful little explainer on how to track down previous versions of Home Office guidance and also check what has changed with any updates. 

For those and the rest of the week here and elsewhere, read on.

Cheers, Sonia

What we’ve been reading

Nigerian students at Teesside University ordered to leave UK after currency crash – The Guardian, 22 May

I fled the Taliban and crossed the Channel in a small boat. People come to England as a last resort – The Big Issue, 26 May

Investigation: A teenager took his own life in a Birmingham hotel. Now, his family want answers – Birmingham Dispatch, 23 May

Cut extra red tape for Heathrow airport transit passengers, Lords committee urges government – Independent, 21 May

Value for Money from Legal Aid – House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, 24 May

Privacy rights: Children rescued at Dover and unlawful photographs – Zoe McCallum – Inforrm, 24 May

Immigration: what the public think as the election approaches – UK in a changing Europe, 24 May

Asylum housing tycoon is among the UK’s wealthiest – here’s what conditions are like inside the properties his company runs – The Conversation, 22 May

Immigration is falling but the economic cost may be high – UK in a changing Europe, 23 May

Almost 100 refugee households facing homelessness in Wigan – Wigan Today, 20 May

Royal College of Nursing responds to 76% fall in visa applications from overseas health and care workers – Royal College of Nursing, 22 May