We can’t deport this criminal because his child might be trans
Foreign offenders are being spared deportation on the most dubious ‘human rights’ grounds imaginable.

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What will it take to get foreign criminals removed from the UK? Barely a week passes without news of a deportation being blocked on questionable ‘human rights’ grounds, or of criminals being allowed to wander freely around Britain, despite them having no right to be in the country. Now, in a story that almost defies belief, a drug dealer with an extensive rap sheet has been spared deportation from Britain because he has a child who might be transgender.
The Daily Mail reports this week that a Jamaican man, known only as GH in court documents, was convicted in 2021 of supplying crack cocaine and heroin. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison and was served a deportation order. On top of that, GH – who arrived in the UK in 1991 – has been in and out of jail for various offences between 2007 and 2015. His children are also reported to have witnessed him beating their mother (whom he has since separated from).
You might think this extensive criminal record would be good grounds to have GH removed from the UK. You might also think the usual human-rights defence of a ‘right to a family life’ shouldn’t apply in a case where domestic abuse has been alleged. But that would be giving far too much credit to Britain’s human-rights-centred migration regime.
Last month, Judge Sarah Pinder blocked GH’s deportation. She decided that, because one of his children was ‘questioning her gender’ and the only person she would speak about her gender issues with was GH, this would make his deportation ‘unduly harsh’. The fact that GH’s children are mixed-race was also cited as grounds for blocking his removal. Because their mother is white British, Judge Pinder argued that their father’s deportation would leave the children with ‘unmet emotional needs linked not just to the loss of a parent but to the loss of the parent who represents half of their cultural identity’.
The shocking failure to deport GH is hardly an aberration. Indeed, just last week, the Daily Mail revealed that a convicted rapist from Gambia has not only been allowed to remain in the UK – he has also received compensation for the Home Office’s attempts to deport him.
Ebou Jasseh first arrived in the UK in 2004 on a six-month visa. He then applied for asylum, but was denied. He promised he would return to Gambia voluntarily, but was still in the UK 11 years later, when he tricked a drunken woman into coming home with him, before attacking and raping her. He was duly sentenced to six years in prison and, when his sentence came to an end in 2019, was supposed to be deported. Soon after his release, he broke the terms of his licence, and was then returned to jail before being held in Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre near Heathrow Airport.
Over the years, Jasseh has mounted six legal challenges against his deportation. In a judgment published last year, the High Court concluded that he had been ‘unlawfully’ detained at Colnbrook, because the Home Office should have foreseen that his deportation to Gambia was unlikely to be successful. As a result, Jasseh has been awarded an undisclosed amount of money in compensation for the state’s ‘oppressive’ treatment of him. According to the Mail, the Home Office was still attempting to have him deported right up until last week.
The list of dangerous foreign criminals who have escaped deportation makes a mockery of Britain’s borders. Crime bosses, terrorists and even grooming-gang leaders have been spared removal from the UK, either on human-rights grounds or because their deportation orders were simply not enforced. We have a failing, dysfunctional system that routinely puts the rights of foreign criminals above the safety of the law-abiding public.
Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.
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