Britain cannot deport career-criminal because of daughter's "gender identity"

The Home Office has been unable to remove a career-criminal because his daughter, who he only sees part-time, has problems with her "gender identity". The ECHR strikes again.

A newly released judgement by the Upper Immigration Tribunal is perhaps totemic of the problems that Britain faces when attempting to deport foreign nationals.

It has been ruled that the Home Office is unable to remove a career criminal from Britain, who has most recently been convicted of dealing heroin and crack-cocaine, for which he served 40 months imprisonment. It follows a string of convictions between 2007 and 2015 in which the individual was found guilty of a host of different crimes and received a range of sentences.

The inability to remove him hinges (you guessed it) on the ECHR and Article 8; the right to family life.

This is despite the courts finding that “he had not maintained a genuine and subsisting relationship with a qualifying partner” and that he only had a part-time relationship with his children, one that was described by the Home Office as “limited”.

Nonetheless, the judge ruled that this man could stay in Britain because of the “harshness” that deporting him would enact upon his children.

It was claimed that the individual could not be removed because one of his children was “experiencing issues with her gender identity, which she had only been able to discuss with her father”. These problems had grown greatly during the man’s time in prison and his separation from his daughter. By this logic, is this man also exempt from a long-term custodial sentence given the “difficulties” that this would pose to his children?

The case also sets out that the individual, having arrived in 1991 at aged 15, was “socially and culturally integrated” in the UK and thus deportation to Jamaica would prove challenging for him. The idea that an individual who repeatedly falls foul of British law could really be considered an integrated citizen is a debate for another day, but the claim appears outlandish when stacked next to the judge’s decision that deporting this individual would deprive his children - who are mixed race - of “half of their cultural identity”. Their white British mother, it is argued, would be unable to satisfy this element of the children’s wellbeing. An odd thing to say if we are to simultaneously believe that this man is “culturally integrated”.

On these grounds the Home Office’s case was dismissed, with the Upper Tribunal deciding to uphold the individual’s human rights appeal. He thus remains in the UK, and any subsequent crime by this individual must fall solely on the shoulders of the judge who made this decision.

An argument will be made by those who support this decision that, having arrived in 1991 (although not possessing citizenship) this man should not be removed from British society. But were there to be a British national who was known to be a career criminal, and had most recently partaken in the serious crime of dealing class-A drugs, then few in the country would have any qualms in locking them up and throwing away the key, thus removing them from British society and protecting our streets. Long term incarceration, which is frankly what these kind of crimes deserve, and deportation, have the same desired effect in that they remove a huge blight from our communities.

What is noteworthy about this decision, however, is the so-called ‘judge’ who got the final say.

Judge Sarah Pinder (she/her, as per her Linkedin) is a barrister by trade, and formerly on the books at Goldsmith Chambers - a hotbed of well-to-do human rights lawyers - including the prominent open border campaigner Dr Charlotte Proudman (those who follow the immigration debate will be familiar with her work…). Their credential as an open-border campaign entity, however, is best exemplified by their ‘Immigration and Public Law’ division, which Pinder led until 2023. Under Pinder’s watch, this division openly criticised the then-Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, randomly strode into the climate change debate by claiming that “there is no Planet B”, claimed their purpose was to do their “fiercest best to hold the Home Office to account”, claimed Britain had “betrayed” Afghan refugees, and referred to Tory legislation intended to tackle the illegal migration crisis as “cruel”. It also indicated that it viewed the Rwanda deportation scheme as a “cruel vanity project”.

This, of course, is to provide but a snapshot of the activism on show by Goldsmith Chambers

Before becoming a ‘judge’, Pinder was a regular columnist at the “Free Movement” publication, an outlet for left-wing lawyers to opine about the abhorrence of borders and any attempts to tackle illegal migration.

Her social media, where she tweets from the @demitranshumant handle (?…), shows all the hallmarks that you would expect from a left-wing activist. Her page is littered with retweets of “the News Agents”, Byline Times’ Otto English, Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, and, of course, “Led by Donkeys”.

Owing to the sheer scale of material, a lot of time could be spent extracting online examples of Pinder’s previous career in fighting for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to remain in Britain, but for the purpose of this blog it is simply worth highlighting that this is not an individual who believes people should be removed from our country.

So why is someone, with such a clear persuasion, presiding over contentious immigration decisions? Why are immigration judges, as a group, predominantly drawn from a certain caste of open-border fanatic, who have spent years aggrandising their own egos by keeping people in Britain? Why are the British public now expected to pay for these campaigners, for that is what they are, to hijack the functions of the state to their own ideological ends? We need to overhaul this country’s immigration tribunals and reclaim them for the current cartel of busybodies, and well-to-do lefty lawyers.

Read the Tribunal decision here.