Belfast's Immigration Raids Build on Long History of Colonial Repression
By Lauren Fernandes, Policy and Campaigns Officer at the Migrants' Rights Network
Holding our Immigration Raids report in front of the Belfast Peace Walls
In West Belfast, many of the walls are filled with murals dedicated not just to the Irish Republican movement, but also to international solidarity, most notably with Palestine. Walking up and down Falls Road, it is clear that these histories of global solidarity are now embedded in the landscape in this part of Belfast- an area that is largely working class, that saw a lot of the violence of British occupation during the Troubles, and where Irish is spoken more than any other area of the North of Ireland* (West Belfast contains the Gaeltacht Quarter).
It made me reflect on the anti-imperialism of the Asian Youth Movements (AYM) - a collection of anti-racist groups led by South Asian diaspora across England mainly in the 1970s and 80s - and the coverage of the Irish republican struggle in their publications. Bradford AYM, for example, was part of the North of England Irish Prisoner Committee, and covered the protests inside Long Kesh prison and the use of pre-emptive counter-terror powers to repress activists. On this latter point, I was reminded of how similar powers are still used today against marginalised groups - particularly Muslims and now migrants who cross the Channel (there being a big overlap here).
The mural of Bobby Sands on Falls Road
The work of the AYMs has been a significant influence on my work. Not only has it been the focus of years of my research at university, but the criminalisation of community self-defence for South Asians (e.g. the Bradford 12, Newham 8, and Newham 7 cases) and other racialised groups underpinned the time I grew up and was living in decades later. The growth of the counter-terror regime in the early 2000s did not start with 9/11 in the US and the military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan: the watershed Terrorism Act 2000 drew together and intensified a number of pieces of legislation introduced in explicit reference to counter-terror powers focused on the North of Ireland. It codified powers that had existed as temporary ‘states of exception’ in the occupied region.
Why is this relevant to migratised communities today? Well, these existing powers could be easily mobilised against another community: the institutional framework that had been developed and tested in the North of Ireland, largely during the Troubles (1966-98), in addition to an atmosphere of suspicion and existing criminalisation of South Asians, many of whom in Britain are Muslim, and were increasingly specifically targeted throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. With both communities, the state has been able to exploit a manufactured hysteria, particularly with post-9/11 Islamophobia, to implement more extreme powers that are said to exclusively impact so-called ‘suspect communities’, but the net gradually increases to affect more ‘sympathetic’ victims - White retirees taking part in non-violent acts of protest in solidarity with Palestine, for example.
Similarly, the false panic around migration has enabled anti-migrant politicians to dramatically expand the scope of counter-terror powers in relation to migration policy. This is the case with the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill currently going through Parliament.
This logic of associating religious signifiers with certain politics that are assumed to be deviant, and the punishment of entire communities, where ‘suspicion’ based in prejudice is enough to detain someone outside of the usual regulations and protections of criminal law. It is of little surprise, then, that internment and indefinite detention have been used against both communities, Muslim and Irish, in a context of more broadly targeted practices of surveillance and deprivation of liberty. This doesn’t easily go away, which is why I was so interested in doing more research and engagement in the North of Ireland when the much higher numbers of immigration raids there became apparent in our data.
Impact of immigration raids on the ground
At the beginning of June, I went to Belfast to discuss immigration raids and the research that Migrants’ Rights Network published last year. This revealed Belfast to experience far more raids than any other area of the UK over a number of years. The focal point of these raids is travel routes between Ireland and Britain, and so the port is a significant target because of sea travel routes with England (via Birkenhead) and Scotland (via Stranraer). Belfast George Best City Airport and Belfast International Airport are also sizable targets.
Presenting our Immigration Raids report to Gerry Carroll, People Before Profit MLA for West Belfast
We began looking into the data around raids to give us more information on how racialised people are disproportionately targeted, receiving data on nationality and location (in the form of postcode areas). When going through the first round of data, covering January 2022 to September 2023, it was immediately apparent that Belfast was the largest hotspot, even before we created a heatmap of the raids. Between January 2022 and September 2024, the area in Belfast surrounding the port and George Best City Airport (BT3 postcode area) saw 1,966 raids and Belfast International Airport (BT29 postcode area) saw 959 raids.
This was surprising to me, as most of the previous publicity around raids and resistance to them focused on London. The shift away from London was apparent when comparing this dataset to earlier figures from January 2018 to September 2019: London postcode areas went from six out of the top ten most raided locations to two (CR0 in Croydon and NW10 in Harlesden have consistently been represented within the top ten).
However, it wasn’t just Belfast that remained a hotspot for raids throughout the time periods we looked into. The other areas heavily targeted were Stranraer (DG9) with 1,589 recorded raids, and Birkenhead (CH41) with 1,052. Stranraer, Birkenhead and Belfast are relatively close together, and so it became clear that ferry travel routes between the North of Ireland and Britain, from the ports in Stranraer and Birkenhead, were significant focal points for Immigration Enforcement.
The immigration enforcement operation covering this area straddling the Irish Sea is called Operation Gull. It involves British and Irish police and immigration enforcement forces regulating movement in and out of the Common Travel Area (CTA), meaning they essentially act as border enforcement between the UK and Ireland in an area that doesn’t have a hard border. Because the CTA is an open border area for British and Irish citizens, the policing of it relies heavily on racial profiling - a point that was confirmed by the community groups we spoke to.
We gathered in a church hall in the city centre a few times that week, as well as a damp storage room above a pub, and in Belfast City Hall. We spent time with members of the community and joined them for a session on tenants’ rights led by CATU, followed by a hot meal cooked by their peers. We spoke to people involved in local organising and they helped us to better understand the context in Belfast and the North of Ireland more broadly, as well as what they have heard happening on the ground.
Our research also provided a perspective that most people we spoke to weren’t aware of. While some who travelled by ferry to and from Belfast knew about some people being stopped, and others spoke of raids occurring on roads connecting the North to the Republic of Ireland, no one was aware of the scale at which they were happening. They were aware of the reliance on racial profiling in stops, both East-West (between Britain and Ireland) and North-South (between the North and Republic of Ireland). Ensuring that people’s CTA rights are fully upheld was a key demand from them as a result.
Heatmap showing immigration raids around Belfast between October 2023 and September 2024
Alongside Operation Gull is a counter-terror operation carried out by the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) called Operation Bi-Vector. While little is known about ongoing counter-terror operations like Bi-Vector, we do know that ( at least until 2018) not a single person had been detained under counter-terror powers following a stop under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in the North of Ireland, despite a high number of stops. Instead, people were more often referred for action, including immigration-related controls in particular.
The historic use of internment and emergency counter-terror powers really stood out to me. Internment in the North of Ireland was the practice of mass arrest and imprisonment without trial of people suspected to be part of the IRA, while the Prevention of Terrorism Acts (particularly the 1974 Act) functioned essentially as a more temporary version of and precursor to the Terrorism Act 2000, conferring emergency powers to police. Today, the North of Ireland still functions to some extent as a state of exception in the UK because of pre-existing and new counter-terror powers and practices primarily targeted at travel in the CTA.
This notion of the North of Ireland being governed separately to the rest of the UK was reflected in conversations we had with politicians and community groups, both in the sense of the relationship between the North and the Republic of Ireland and Britain as well as the dynamic this creates with Britain-based groups.
On the former point, people felt that the prevalence of these exceptional and somewhat unique powers used in the North reflected an ongoing situation of British occupation of the six counties that make up the territory. For me, this also highlighted the position of many citizens of the (former) British Empire resident in Britain, who have historically been subjected to similar exceptional policing powers. In 1981, twelve Asian youth known as the ‘Bradford 12’ were arrested on conspiracy charges for being prepared to defend their community from the far-right after the police neglected to protect them. Their case was a rallying point for the AYMs, which helped them get acquitted. Today, Muslims, particularly those who are South Asian, are wildly disproportionate targets of the counter-terror regime. Such practices have been described as internal colonisation, due to the methods of control and censorship targeted at certain populations.
Regarding the latter, there was a unanimous expression of appreciation for us coming to Belfast as a London-based national organisation. It is far too common that organisations based in Britain who claim to be nationwide ignore the North of Ireland. There are lots of reasons for this: from lacking any willingness to even try to understand specific developments there, such as the role of paramilitaries in far-right anti-migrant mobilisations, to neglecting the region in work that speaks of national advocacy. We call on our fellow charities and NGOs to change this: reduce the isolation of the North and groups based there by meaningfully engaging and learning from them.
Learning from Belfast’s community resistance
At MRN, we felt it important to make this trip to Belfast as part of our wider outreach and advocacy work in the devolved nations of the UK. This felt particularly urgent in this scenario due to the extreme difference in the number of immigration raids that we found took place there in comparison to the rest of the country.
We are grateful to the communities and activist groups that we met in Belfast for helping us to better understand what is happening in the North of Ireland, and we will be using this to guide our future research on immigration raids so that it best serves the people working on the ground. We hope that this will be the start of much more engagement and meaningful solidarity with people in the North of Ireland.
I personally will be taking forward the histories and lineages of resistance that continue into the present into my work. My time in Belfast has reaffirmed my inspiration for the anti-colonial solidarities expressed by the AYMs and learning from the methods used by the state to repress those fighting for liberation- methods that were tested in colonies like Ireland before being turned on racialised people in Britain. I again express my gratitude to the people we met with, who welcomed us to Belfast and listened to our work. Níl aon duine neamhdhlíthiúil.
Thank you to PPR, Anaka Collective, United Against Racism and CATU for welcoming us and for the vital work they do, along with our friends at End Deportations Belfast.
*MRN uses both ‘the North of Ireland’ and ‘Northern Ireland’ – I refer to the region here solely as ‘the North of Ireland’ in a personal capacity