We’ve been closed for a couple of weeks, settling into our new space – please keep sharing our news address: St Mary’s Welcome Centre, 8 Church End, E17 9RJ. The drop-in will reopen on 04 September.
I hope you’ve also managed to have break and escape the extreme heat that has come to define the summer of 2026. A summer punctuated by the increasingly palpable reality of climate breakdown – including the devastating news from the Tibet/Nepal border; as well as a string of shocking events. From Ceuta to French police violently slashing boats, and the UK Prime Minister issuing misplaced warnings to people seeking safety – it’s been more of the same! Find details in the news section.
We know the meaning of tighter laws – more immigration enforcement, expansion of detention centres and more live facial recognition on our streets. We are therefore really looking forward to co-hosting a ‘We Keep Us Safe‘ workshop with Migrant Rights Network and Waltham Forest Anti-raids … and you are invited! See below.
We would also like to make a brief but heartfelt mention of the tragic passing of Professor Jason Arday, who was hounded by the media – even after he was cleared of false accusations of plagiarism. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
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There is still time to donate to our London Legal walk fundraiser – please help us reach our £750 target
We Keep Us Safe Workshop
You are invited to join ‘We keep us safe: Making our boroughs true places of sanctuary‘ –
a workshop in partnership with Migrant Rights Network and Waltham Forest Anti-Raids Network (WARN) and we’d love you to join.
We have all seen the devastating impact of ICE in the U.S.. But ICE – Immigration and Compliance Enforcement – operate here too, and the number of raids they carry out is going up. Between October 2024 and September 2025 there were 21,917 raids on communities across the UK – a 38% increase on the previous year.
The function of raids is to exclude and disrupt the lives of migrants, their families, businesses and communities. Raids spread violence, fear and mistrust. They make everyone less safe. But together we can resist.
The workshop will cover the following:
– Landscape of raids
– How we resist together
– Strategy
Workshop details:
📆 Friday 04 September ⏰ 2.30 – 3.30 – registration, networking and refreshments (vegan and vegetarian options available) and from 3.30 – 5.30 – workshop. 📍 St Mary’s Welcome Centre, 8 Church End, E17 9RJ
♿️ The venue is wheelchair accessible. Please contact us if you have accessibility needs or any questions about access.
📩 Please register here – we have a limited number of places available, so attendance is on a first come first served basis. Please only register if you are coming to ensure everyone who wants to join is able to. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions – [email protected].
Earlier this month, unprecedented events unfolded in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa. Over 50,000 people – though numbers differ and some sources have put numbers as high as 80,000 – crossed the border from Morocco hoping to make their way to the mainland. By the end of the weekend the majority had made their way back to Morocco. Between 70 and 100 people lost their lives. But no-one seemed to care much. Instead, the usual suspects, including the European Commission and a number of European governments and the media, went out of their way to exploit the situation, warning of an ‘invasion’, fuelling anger and fear and attacking Spain’s progressive regularisation programme.
What was missed in the furore is that a) restrictive legislative frameworks and the dismantling of regular pathways lead to people taking huge risks to make their way to Europe – because they are left with NO other choice; and b) our economies rely heavily on migrants – not least in agriculture, yet our governments choose to ignore that fact. Remember the fruit picker shortage post Brexit?And yet another example of weaponising migrants as a political tool to satisfy the far-right.
The UK government’s obsession with ‘stopping the boats’ is turning more and more violent. In the last week, there have been a number of reports showing French police aggressively slashing boats and putting people’s lives in ever greater peril. A woman was ran over the beach by a police buggy and a three year-old child was found on board a boat alone, while his pregnant mother was held by police. The sheer inhumanity of these tactics is baffling. But it’s not stopping the Home Office from proudly publishing figures of the number of “small boat crossing events” – 185 in total – that have been intercepted. This also comes at great financial cost to the UK tax payer – £660 million under the latest deal with France.
Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is on course to pursue the same strategy as his predecessor, one that focusses on the vilification of migrants and spreading lies – and we know what happens when we keep repeating the same lies! Last week, he defended a Home Office (yes that’s the same Home Office that is boasting about violence against people seeking safety) – booklet telling people seeking asylum that rape and harassment are illegal in the UK.
Oh really, he might want to tell a few others about this!
The awful truth is that gender-based violence knows no borders. Ask Andrew Tate! It is committed in every country, economic group, ethnicity, age and social group, and overwhelmingly by men and boys against women and girls. In the UK, one in three women will experience some form of gender based violence – including domestic abuse, harassment, up skirting, etc. – at some point their lives. Two women are killed by a partner or ex-partner every eight days. Something that the outrageous headline in Daily Mail: “Ministers forced to tell asylum seekers: Don’t rape women!” also chose to ignore!
Meanwhile, the situation in the U.S. remains critical as legal experts in Minnesota say a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule will put more asylum seekers into deportation proceedings without an interview.
Waltham Forest Migrant Action 