When GB News published an article listing 11 organisations “thwarting” the Government’s deportation plans last September, a wave of fear spread across charities that work with refugee and immigrant women.
Many felt forced to scramble together risk mitigation plans and some even closed their offices.
Women For Refugee Women [WRW], a charity set up to support refugee and asylum-seeking women who have fled persecution, was forced to close its offices for two weeks. It also brought in new safety measures such as disallowing lone-working in the office, implementing a “buddy system” instead and is working towards having CCTV installed.
WRW, which has successfully campaigned for the Government to introduce, and maintain, a 72-hour limit on the detention of pregnant women, and is currently campaigning to end the use of asylum hotels, made the decision to remove all staff and trustee details from its website, and created new impersonal email addresses.
Around the same time, the Charity Commission took the highly unusual step of removing the names of trustees from several charities listed on its website. This was because the Home Office gave a far-right influencer the names of some organisations with which it had had meetings about asylum accommodation, following a freedom of information [FOI] request. WRW had also had a meeting with the Home Office about the malicious use of FOI requests in this context.
article continues at https://national.thelead.uk/p/charities-vulnerable-far-right-threats-asylum-immigration