Durrant Pate/Contributor

The British Home Office has agreed to repatriate a Jamaican Windrush man, having agreed that he was wrongly deported and forced to live on the streets of Kingston in horrific conditions for more than a decade.

The man, 64-year-old Winston Knight, lived in the United Kingdom (UK) for 47 years before being wrongly deported. In this highly unusual move, which comes after protracted legal action, the Home Office has agreed to fly Knight back home to the UK, revoking his deportation order.

Speaking to the British Guardian from Kingston, Knight said he was delighted to finally be on his way back to Britain after more than a decade of enduring horrific conditions on the streets. “I’m doing much better now I know I have won my case and will be returning to the UK. But I am coming from hell. I have been living in a war zone in Kingston and I’ve had some very tough days,” he told the British publication.

UK return in the coming weeks

Knight is likely to be back in the UK in the coming weeks, possibly before Windrush Day on June 22, which celebrates the contribution Caribbean migrants and their families have made to the UK. It marks the date in 1948 that HMT Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex, bringing hundreds of passengers from the Caribbean to the UK.

The Windrush man is being put up in a Jamaican hotel before being returned to the UK. “For the first time since I was deported here, I’m sleeping in a bed,” he reported, explaining, “I witnessed so many murders and stabbings and saw so many people being beaten. I survived by eating vegetables from the market, bread and bananas. I’ve received a lot of abuse in Jamaica, being called ‘English’ and ‘deportee’.”

Knight was deported from the UK in 2013 after he was convicted of stealing a piece of jewellery during the 2011 riots, in what his lawyers described as an “opportunistic mistake.” He arrived in the UK in 1966 at 6 years old with people unrelated to him. 

Knight experienced a difficult childhood in South London, was not allowed to attend school and later worked on construction sites. The lack of school and employment records made it difficult for him to prove he had been “ordinarily resident” in the UK in 1973.

Like all Citizens of the UK and Colonies – a status granted before 1983 – he was granted indefinite leave to remain. But his lawyers had to carry out painstaking work to track down witnesses, who remembered him from his childhood and could corroborate his account of the time he arrived in the UK.

Knight brought a judicial review arguing that he was exempt from deportation, and just hours before the final hearing on May 15, the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, conceded that he was a member of the Windrush generation.

Nina Kamp, a consultant solicitor at Duncan Lewis Solicitors who represents Knight argues, “this case ranks among the gravest Windrush injustices we have seen – not only because he was excluded for 12 years, but because the home secretary clung to an indefensible position until the very last moment, needlessly prolonging and compounding his suffering.”

She adds, “Mr Knight has suffered unimaginable harm being homeless in an extremely volatile environment for over a decade with no support. The physical and psychological toll is profound and will take years to repair. Astonishingly, the home secretary has still offered him no apology for the historic wrong her department inflicted.”