On Borders and Belonging

Photo by Peter Mason

Back in 2014, I sat in a London branch of Pret A Manger opposite Trenton Oldfield. He cradled his young daughter against his chest, occasionally spooning milk foam into her eager mouth. Were it not for the slightly bohemian air afforded to him by the presence of his daughter, he would have blended perfectly into the sea of white, middle-class office-workers queuing up for their coffee. Even the deliberateness with which his hair and moustache had been groomed was overly familiar in this part of the city, bordering Shoreditch and the winding lanes of Spittalfields. 

Trenton did not look like a man recently released from prison, and he certainly did not look like the likely target of a home office deportation attempt, yet he was both of these things.

“Trenton did not look like a man recently released from prison, and he certainly did not look like the likely target of a home office deportation attempt...”

“Do you think borders are a good thing?” he asked me. 

I hadn’t anticipated that question.

I’d asked to meet him to discuss the shocking arrest of Isabella Acevedo during her daughter’s wedding ceremony a week before. The arrest, carried out by immigration officers, had come to public attention on account of Isabella’s employer, the Tory immigration minister, Mark Harper. Prompted by his own legislative changes, which would see a £20,000 fine for employers caught hiring undocumented workers, Harper had taken the decision to review Isabella’s documents.

The review revealed that at some point over the seven years she had been working as his cleaner, Isabella’s documents had lapsed. Thus Mark Harper, the very government minister in charge of the new legislation, was also in violation of it. Naturally, he escaped paying a fine and the consequences for him were limited to temporary embarrassment followed by an announcement that he would resign. He was of course, swiftly re-appointed in another ministerial role; as is so often the case with disgraced members of the elite – no harm done.

For Isabella, the consequences were far more severe. Having been forcibly torn apart from her family on the day of her daughter’s wedding, she was then incarcerated in an immigration detention facility and would soon be covertly deported to Colombia (though neither Trenton nor I knew of this then).

At the time, I was working on a documentary development examining the increasingly draconian enforcement powers being rolled out by the Home Office under Theresa May’s tenure. Patrolling immigration enforcement vans were becoming visibly noticeable across London, as were the presence of immigration officers in travel terminals - aggressively eyeballing and assessing anyone of colour for potential pitfalls in their story of ‘belonging’ through which they might find grounds to detain or deport them from the UK. The infamous “Go Home” billboards and the fleet of vans circulating London with this message were the icing on the cake of May’s overtly aggressive campaign. The crude messages they bore echoed the language of the far-right and cemented the impression of the UK as a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants.  

Isabella’s case was a blatant example of the Home Office’s hypocrisy and the excessive militancy that was becoming increasingly commonplace within its modus operandi. There was no justifiable reason to deliberately disrupt the wedding service in such a confrontational way – with some officers failing to identify themselves and none providing a clear explanation for the arrest. Surely it would have been altogether more logical and humane to approach and if necessary, detain Isabella at her place of work? Presumably, this was not the chosen option due to the implicit nature of her employer’s hand in all this – the chosen location of the arrest instead, purposefully selected to ease Mark Harper’s liability and cause increased distress to Isabella; whose otherness fell perfectly within the proscribed stereotype of the Home Office’s “illegal immigrant” super-villain.

Trenton’s prison sentence was another example of Theresa May’s heavy-handed war on immigration. Originally from Australia, his crime had been to disrupt the 2012 Oxford-Cambridge boat race, deliberately swimming into the path of the competing boats in an act of direct protest against elitism and inequalities within British society. 

Ironically, as a white, European male (albeit the owner of an Australian passport), he was himself inherently privileged – a privilege enhanced by his private education. He was, undeniably, a product of the very thing he was protesting against.

Back in 2012, the effectiveness of Trenton’s protest had not been immediately apparent to me and I had been somewhat unconvinced by his method of protest. I even felt sorry for the rowers, the culmination of whose hard work and training Trenton had sabotaged.

“...in the eyes of the law Trenton was stripped of his white, male privileges and viewed as “other””

However in the weeks and months that followed, the reaction by the authorities and particularly the behind the scenes meddling of certain government ministers, served to shed light on why Trenton’s protest was indeed significant.

Had the initial charge of a public order offence remained as it was, Trenton’s protest would have been quite easy to forget beyond the circle of Oxbridge rowers who were directly affected by it. However, the events that followed revealed how Trenton’s actions had ignited fear within the establishment, rendering him a symbolic figure for them to crush, lest any others should dare to challenge the great traditions of the British elite. The way in which his case was escalated raised alarms not just for people of colour who were so often targeted and penalised disproportionately by the authorities, but also for white, British people who valued their fundamental right to protest.

Suddenly, in the eyes of the law Trenton was stripped of his white, male privileges and viewed as “other”. The government honed in on the things that made him different and used them as a means of exorcising him from British society. He had been eligible for British citizenship for over seven years, but this fact became obsolete as the authorities became focused on his removal. 

Under pressure from a Tory MP, the police reclassified Trenton’s charge from a public order offence to public nuisance; with this came the potential for far harsher sentencing, including a maximum life sentence. Trenton was suddenly faced with the possibility of prison and potentially deportation. For a peaceful protest, both eventualities seemed hugely disproportionate and highly unlikely.

Yet as the fallout from his protest became ever more Orwellian, Trenton was sentenced to six months in prison – but his ordeal did not end there. When he was eventually released from prison, in an unprecedented move, his application for a spousal visa to remain in the UK with his British wife and young daughter was denied. Theresa May, it seemed, was set on his banishment at all costs, justifying her decision by claiming Trenton was a threat to British security and that his presence was not conducive to the public good (despite his many years of community and urban regeneration work in the UK).

In the face of all this, I had to reconsider the significance of his protest. Would Trenton really have faced such repercussions had his protest disrupted any other sports event – or did such recourses only exist to protect and preserve the British elite and their traditions?

Fortunately for Trenton, despite being criminalised and outcast as a foreigner, he was still able to garner widespread support from a number of influential figures. His team put together a legal defence challenging Teresa May’s ruling, citing it as disproportionate and in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – namely, Trenton’s right to family life. His appeal was successful and Teresa May’s ruling was overturned, enabling Trenton to remain in the UK with his family.

Having faced the wrath of the British government and been threatened with the possibility of their family being torn apart, Trenton and his wife were now standing in solidarity with Isabella Acevedo, painfully aware that she did not share the same privileges as Trenton. Together, they were crowd funding to cover her basic family needs and to support a legal challenge against her removal.

Despite their campaigning, not long after my meeting with Trenton and without the knowledge of her family or her legal team, Isabella was deported. She was taken from her bed in Yarls Wood immigration detention centre at 12:06am and forced to board a plane whilst still wearing her pyjamas.

I’ve reflected on Trenton’s question about borders a lot since that meeting. I was deeply disturbed then at the Government’s shift towards a right-wing rhetoric, and in the years that have followed, the rate at which the hostility towards migrants has escalated has proved to be nothing short of terrifying. We’ve seen families torn apart and young people who know nothing but Britain as their home being sent away to foreign lands. Then came Brexit, and of course the Windrush scandal which culminated in at least 164 wrongful detentions and deportations and the resignation of the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd (who was once again swiftly reappointed in another ministerial role).

One of the final recourses available to safeguard migrants against such injustice are the protections afforded by the Human Rights Act. Yet even these laws which champion our right to equality have come under attack, with a succession of Tory proposals to scrap the Act in favour of something more British (and by nature, less favourable to migrants). Against this backdrop, the human suffering born of the border lines we carve onto the Earth continues unabated.

The very concept of equality has become deeply confused in the UK. When Amber Rudd, the disgraced MP responsible for unlawfully persecuting and deporting of a generation of migrants can be reappointed as the Minister for Women and Equalities what are we to understand ‘equality’ to mean?

If Trenton were to ask me again, “Do you believe in borders?” I would answer without hesitation. Until every person can exercise their right to free movement as an equal, borders will always exist as means of oppression.