Jamaican-born father faces UK deportation after 26 years under new immigration rules

A Jamaican-born man who has spent more than half his life in Britain could be sent back to Jamaica in one of the earliest cases to emerge since tougher anti-immigration measures were set out in an immigration bill unveiled last week.

Mark Nelson, 46, arrived in the UK in 2000 and later opened his own car repair business. He has five children who are British citizens and a British partner. In 2017, he was jailed for four years for cultivating cannabis, which he said he turned to after his business ran into money trouble. He has had no further convictions.

In 2022, Nelson wrote a Guardian opinion piece about the threat of removal. He said he no longer had ties in Jamaica after his great-grandparents, who raised him there, died when he was 16.

Authorities later called off his removal. Instead, he was fitted with an electronic tag and required to sign in weekly at a Home Office reporting centre. But when Nelson attended his appointment last Thursday, he was arrested, held in detention, and told the government intended to deport him to Jamaica.

Speaking from a detention centre near Heathrow Airport, Nelson told the Guardian he was crushed to be facing deportation again and separation from his five children and his partner. "I'm in a hot and filthy cell on the induction wing. My mental health is so bad because of what the Home Office has done to me. For the first time in my life, I have taken antidepressant medication.

"My family is so upset. My brother, who is 46, was crying on the phone when he heard I had been detained. I haven't been able to sleep a wink since they brought me here. I was in such a state of shock when they arrested me," he said.

"What the Home Office don't think about when they try to deport someone like me is the impact it has not only on the person but on so many other people around them. I love my kids so much, and I can't bear to think of them being without their dad. I try to be a good role model for them. I talk to them about my crime to try to ensure they don't make the same mistake I made."

His partner, Rachel Derbyshire, said Nelson's relatives were all deeply distressed by his detention and the renewed deportation threat. "It seems that the Home Office is not going to let this go. Mark's mental health is really bad because of this. He's a really lovely guy, but the Home Office is treating him as if he was a rapist or a murderer."

The new immigration bill sets a stricter standard for the family and private life assessment, known as article 8, in deportation matters.

Even where exceptional factors are weighed — including how fully someone is integrated socially and culturally in the UK, whether reintegration in their country of birth would face serious barriers, and whether removal would place undue hardship on relatives — officials appear set to pursue Nelson's deportation despite his long residence and close family connections in Britain.

The Home Office has been approached for comment.