Lorna Siggins, in the Irish Times, reports this morning how Hawo, a 23-year-old wheelchair user from Somalia, was woken up by officers from the Garda National Immigration Bureau at 11pm one night in November 2012 and told she was going to be deported.
Polio sufferer Hawo, who had arrived in Ireland aged 17 in 2008, was taken to Dublin Airport with no belongings, other than €60 that her husband gave her.
Ms Siggins reports:
“At one point [on the night GNIB officers came to deport her], she recalls, one of the officers became exasperated. She says he told her: “We will grab you from where you are and put you in your chair if you don’t go.” There is no independent corroboration of this remark.”
“Hawo’s husband was told to pack a few things for his wife. The officers told him that he could travel with them in a taxi to the airport to say goodbye. Hawo got into her wheelchair, put a dress over her pyjamas, but refused to use the controls. The taxi arrived at the airport. By then, she realised she had forgotten her incontinence pads. Her husband offered to return home to get them, but was told he wouldn’t be allowed to see his wife again if he did. They were put in a waiting room.”
“My husband helped me to lie on some chairs, but they didn’t want that and three of them carried me back into my wheelchair,” she says. “Another man wanted to shout at me, while two of his colleagues were trying to stop him. Then they took my husband away.”… She asked if she could see her travel documents. They declined.
…
“She asked if she could go to the toilet. While in the cubicle, an officer warned her not to “do something stupid”.“One man pushed me in the chair to the airplane and two walked beside,” she says. It was now daylight, approaching 9am. The front wheels in her wheelchair had not been working properly, she recalls, and it stalled. She fell out onto the tarmac and burst into tears. One of the officers took photos, she claims, and warned her that he would “show them what you did” – implying that she had stalled the chair and fallen on purpose. She told him that she was “not going anywhere”. After a few minutes, she recalls, one of the officers asked her if they could lift her back into her chair. She was wheeled back into the terminal and told she “wasn’t going to leave now” but would be taken to prison.”
Ms Siggins’ report follows another on Saturday in which she wrote how Somali asylum seeker Mohamed Sleyum Ali died after he was allegedly attacked in Tanzania hours after he landed in the country following his deportation from Ireland in April 2014.
Wheelchair user with just €60 in pocket taken to brink of deportation (Lorna Siggins, Irish Times)
Previously: Deaths Of Asylum Seekers