Together, we can stop the Home Office from unlawfully excluding EU citizens and their families from their home in the UK. We can stop them from eroding long-established principles of justice. Please join us and donate now to our CrowdJustice Campaign.
THE ISSUE
After Brexit, EU citizens and their family members needed to prove they were eligible to remain in the UK. Applications had to be submitted by the end of June 2021. Thousands of people missed this deadline. Many were unaware that they needed to apply.
Last year, the Home Office introduced new rules making it much harder for people applying after June 2021 to submit valid applications to regularise their status. Since then, Here for Good and other advice organisations supporting EU citizens and their families are seeing blanket rejection letters from the Home Office, saying that there were not good enough reasons for applicants to apply late to the scheme.
In our experience, those who make late applications are often very vulnerable, or have faced extremely difficult circumstances that made it hard to apply to the scheme by the end of June 2021. In some cases, it has been almost impossible for people to navigate the scheme without the knowledge and support of charities or law firms. Many applicants have been homeless, struggling with mental or physical health problems, or victims of domestic abuse.
OUR LEGAL CHALLENGE AGAINST THE HOME OFFICE
We believe that Home Office decisions to reject applications should come with a right of appeal, so that an independent Judge can look at all the facts and evidence in a case to decide whether an applicant had a good reason for applying to the scheme late.
We are seeing adults and children across the country who came here legally and have been living here for many years being squeezed out of the system – it is our fear that EU citizens who were not able to obtain the correct immigration status documents will soon face similar issues to those citizens of the Windrush generation.
The Home Office cannot continue to penalise society’s most vulnerable citizens without legal intervention. As a small charity, we will need your help to raise £12,000 to have our day in Court to challenge this issue on 18 June 2024. Read more about our legal challenge and support our case on our CrowdJustice page.
