Twenty‑Six Years Of Building A Life — And Now They Want To Tear A Family Apart

A Jamaican man who has lived more than half his life in the UK is facing deportation to his home country in one of the first cases since new anti-immigration measures were announced in last week’s immigration bill.

Mark Nelson, 46, came to the UK in 2000 and set up his own car-mechanic business. He has five British children and a British partner. In 2017, he received a four-year prison sentence for growing cannabis plants, something he said he did after his business experienced financial problems. He has not committed any additional offences.

In 2022, he wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian about being under threat of deportation. He said Jamaica was a place where he no longer knew anyone after his great-grandparents, who brought him up there, died when he was 16.

His removal was later withdrawn, and instead he was tagged and had to report weekly at a Home Office reporting centre. But last Thursday, when Nelson went to report, he was arrested, detained and told that the government intended to deport him to Jamaica.

Speaking from a detention centre near Heathrow airport, Nelson said he was devastated about once again facing deportation and separation from his five children and his partner. “I’m in a hot and filthy cell on the induction wing. My mental health is so bad because of what the Home Office has done to me. For the first time in my life, I have taken antidepressant medication.

“My family is so upset. My brother, who is 46, was crying on the phone when he heard I had been detained. I haven’t been able to sleep a wink since they brought me here. I was in such a state of shock when they arrested me,” he said.

“What the Home Office don’t think about when they try to deport someone like me is the impact it has not only on the person but on so many other people around them. I love my kids so much, and I can’t bear to think of them being without their dad. I try to be a good role model for them. I talk to them about my crime to try to ensure they don’t make the same mistake I made.”

His partner, Rachel Derbyshire, said that all of Nelson’s family were distraught about his detention and threatened deportation. “It seems that the Home Office is not going to let this go. Mark’s mental health is really bad because of this. He’s a really lovely guy, but the Home Office is treating him as if he was a rapist or a murderer.”

The new immigration bill lays out a harsher test for the family and private life test known as Article 8 in deportation cases.

Although exceptional circumstances are taken into consideration – such as the degree to which a person is socially and culturally integrated in the UK, whether there would be significant barriers to integration into their country of birth and whether the effect of the person’s deportation on family members would be excessively harsh – it appears that the government wants to proceed with Nelson’s deportation despite the span of time he has lived in the UK and his strong family ties.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “All foreign national offenders who receive a prison sentence in the UK are referred for deportation at the earliest opportunity.”

“More than 70,000 illegal migrants and foreign national offenders have been returned since this government took office, a 41 per cent increase.”

People have been extremely vocal about Mark Nelson’s situation, and many are saying that 26 years in the UK, British children, and a stable life make his removal cruel and unnecessary. He’s already served his sentence and rebuilt his life.

His situation is cruel, vengeful and a disgrace, and it would harm his five British children, who would lose their father overnight. They are penalising the children, not just him, and it seems that the system is designed to break people.

This case resembles the Windrush scandal, where long-term Caribbean residents were wrongly detained or deported.

The UK is breaking families apart, and sending him back after 26 years would be dangerous and destabilising. Jamaica has a limited support system for people who have been away for decades, and he would be isolated, with no family, no home, and no realistic way to rebuild.

Community organisations accuse the UK of using deportation as a political tool to appear tough on immigration, and the Home Office is “targeting easy cases” — people who have lived here long enough to be compliant and easy to detain.