Last December, a letter from the Home Office dropped through Maria’s door. When she read it, she screamed. At 68, she lives with her disabled partner, Tom, who she cares for, in a rental home in west London, and has been resident in the UK for almost 50 years. The letter said the home secretary had decided to pursue her deportation. “The secretary of state has deemed your deportation to be conducive to the public good,” it continued, “and accordingly it is in the public interest that you be removed from the UK without delay.”
The only thing that ties Maria to the Netherlands, her birthplace, is, she says, her passport. For most of her five decades in residence in the UK, the country was part of the EU, so there was no need for her to apply for leave to remain. In January 2022, she was given EU Settled Status (EUSS), a form of indefinite leave to remain for EU and other European citizens who had been living in the UK for five years or more on 31 December 2020.
“I want to say to the Home Office: ‘Why can’t you just leave me be?’” she says. “I’m a carer. How can I start my life again at the age of 68 in a country I don’t know? Somebody at the Home Office who doesn’t know me … has made a decision about my life. Since I received the letter, I have had so many nightmares.”
Portobello Road market in west London, where Maria had a small stall in the 1970s. Photograph: ANL/Shutterstock
For more than a decade, successive UK home secretaries have tried to outdo each other in making the country unwelcoming to migrants; the so-called “hostile environment”. Over the last year, with anti-immigrant party Reform UK racing ahead in the polls, the Labour government has been talking and acting tough on immigration, in an attempt to reduce that lead. So it boasts about increasing deportations from the UK; it’s detaining asylum seekers en masse in preparation for removing them forcibly to France; has dramatically reduced many work visas in areas such as health and care; and has reduced the right for people who are given permission to work or study here to bring their families with them. It plans, too, to extend the time migrants have to wait before being granted settlement in the UK. To date, there is no evidence that these policies have brought disenchanted voters back to Labour.
Maria first travelled to the UK for a holiday in the long, hot summer of 1976, when she was 17. She never went home.
She moved into a squat, at a time when empty buildings in London were plentiful. A blissful chapter of her life began with her then boyfriend, a roadie for bands including Squeeze, Van Halen and Eddie and the Hot Rods.
“Things were so different in those days,” she says. “Everything felt very free and I was always very positive … I had a small stall at Portobello market and I used to buy things that were in fashion here and send them back to Holland, where they were in demand. There was a cafe we used to go to in Westbourne Grove which introduced me to vegetarian cuisine – things like spinach quiche and cheesecake.”
Maria had had a difficult childhood, and spent some of her teens in foster care. After arriving in the UK, she visited the Netherlands only a handful of times, most recently in 1999, after her mother died. She never considered a permanent return.
After almost 50 years living quietly in the UK, working in various jobs, looking after Tom and nurturing her much-loved garden, she assumed she would spend the rest of her life here.
“The UK is my home,” she says, sitting at her kitchen table with her head in her hands. “I am absolutely in bits. I cannot believe that the Home Office wants to deport me after I have lived here for almost half a century.”
Life in the UK has not always been easy for her. She has been in some difficult relationships and in 2011 she started a job managing a small hotel in north-west London that would lead to her current predicament, .
“I had never planned to manage a hotel,” she says, “but my neighbour at the time took over a derelict building, spent a long time doing it up and kept saying he wanted me to manage it, with him as the landlord. She signed a lease, but “needed to make a profit of £35,000 per month to earn anything from it. I rarely got that much money, so for a long time I didn’t take any salary.
“I was very naive and far too trusting,” she says. “I ended up helping people I felt sorry for, by giving them free accommodation if I had an empty room at the time and they were homeless on the streets. Sometimes they moved in and refused to leave.”
She says that while some of her guests were “absolutely lovely”, others cheated her by leaving without paying for their stay or stealing equipment such as phones or laptops. “I tried to help some of the guests who were struggling financially by signposting them to debt management services. One man nicknamed me ‘Mother Teresa’. The local council sometimes placed homeless people in the hotel and there were fights and assaults and gangs.”
Despite the difficulties, she muddled along, living at the hotel with Tom, and caring for him.
In 2021, everything changed. The hotel was on the first and second floors of a building, while a separate, unconnected restaurant operated in the basement. In August 2021, a fire broke out in the restaurant.
“It was terrifying,” says Maria. “Just before 9am I heard people in the restaurant shouting: ‘Fire, fire!’ We were all evacuated. Tom and I became homeless and lost all of our belongings.”
‘I decided to plead guilty so the whole thing could be finished’ … Isleworth Crown Court, where Maria received a four-month suspended sentence. Photograph: Mick Sinclair/Alamy
For a while, the couple moved around, staying in hotels, living on their savings and waiting for compensation money from the fire. Eventually, they rented an Airbnb in west London. Maria initially thought that repairing the fire damage could take just a couple of months, so she diverted the hotel phone number to her personal phone and told anyone who inquired about rooms that she hoped the hotel would soon reopen.
One day she received a call from a woman whose friend had recommended the hotel to her. “She told me that she and her friend were desperately looking for a place to stay in London. Could I help? I told them the hotel was now closed. But I felt sorry for them and said they could stay in my spare room if they contributed towards the rent. They agreed and moved in. They said they wanted to attend a nearby temple, and for the first couple of days I dropped them off and picked them up from there.”
She says the two women, who had initially seemed to get along well, started to fight. “I asked them what was going on and they said it was something ‘private’.” It turned out one of them wanted to return to Birmingham, where they had both lived previously, and the other didn’t. “I ended up being protective of the one who didn’t want to leave and told her she could stay with us,” says Maria. So she stayed, while her friend returned to Birmingham.
The second woman was with them for just over a week. The day after the first woman left, the police knocked on Maria’s door. They told Maria that they had received reports that someone was being held in the house against their will, “and that the woman who was still staying in the house accused me of selling sex on the premises,” she says. This allegation was soon retracted, but Maria was nonetheless charged with allowing her premises to be used as a brothel.
She told her solicitor she wanted to fight the charges. But it took several years for the case to come to court, and when she went to the hearing, she says the barrister representing her suggested it would be better to plead guilty. That way she would avoid going to jail, which could happen if she fought her case and lost.
“This had been dragging on for two years, and both my partner and I just wanted it to be over,” she says. “The barrister gave me just a few minutes to make my decision. I decided to plead guilty so the whole thing could be finished.
“Following everything I had gone through in the previous few years, I had no fight left in me, so I followed his advice.” She claims she has never been involved in the sex trade, either as a sex worker or a pimp.
In October 2024, she pleaded guilty at Isleworth Crown Court to allowing her premises to be used as a brothel and received a four-month suspended sentence.
“As a condition of my probation I had to have 10 therapy sessions – a mental health treatment requirement. The therapist said my difficult childhood may have resulted in me being exploited and taken advantage of on numerous occasions.”
Last year, she tried to put the experience behind her. Then the letter arrived from the Home Office. After threatening Maria with deportation, it said that the offence she had been convicted of “has caused serious harm”.
In the government guidelines for deportation on the grounds of criminality, it states that it is policy to pursue this where a person has “received a custodial sentence of 12 months or more for a single conviction for a single offence in the UK or overseas; has received combined sentences totalling 12 months or more in the UK or overseas; has received a suspended sentence order (SSO) of six months or more; [or] is a persistent offender”. None of these pertain to Maria. But, crucially for her, the government can pursue deportation for anyone who has been, “convicted in the UK or overseas of an offence which has caused serious harm,” with that last phrase open to interpretation.
double quotation markThis country is her only home. She has no family, no support network, and no life to return to in the Netherlands
A spokesperson for the Home Office says: “We will not allow foreign criminals and illegal migrants to exploit our laws. We are replacing the broken appeals system so we can scale up deportations. All foreign national 0ffenders who receive a prison sentence in the UK are referred for deportation at the earliest opportunity.”
Maria’s immigration lawyer, Naga Kandiah of MTC Solicitors, disputes the government’s grounds for deportation and says he is deeply concerned by the Home Office’s actions. “Given the non-violent, victimless nature of the offence and the minimal sentence imposed, the public interest in deportation is negligible, while the human cost to her would be severe, irreversible and wholly disproportionate,” he says. “My client is a 68-year-old EU citizen who has lived lawfully in the United Kingdom for almost 50 years. This country is her only home. She has no family, no support network, and no life to return to in the Netherlands, a country she has not lived in for almost five decades and last visited in 1999 following her mother’s death. Deportation would tear her away from the only community, stability and identity she has known and condemn her, at pension age, to isolation and trauma in a country that is now effectively foreign to her.”
“It’s very hard to think of the future,” says Maria. “The deportation notice is going round my head all day long. It’s all such a terrible shock. Who needs that at my age? How can you enjoy life, not knowing what’s coming next? The Home Office has taken my passport and every two weeks I have to go and report at a Home Office reporting centre where I never know if I will be arrested and locked up in an immigration detention centre or allowed to return home.
“If the Home Office sends me back to the Netherlands, I would not be able to cope. Everything that I have that is worth staying alive for is here in the United Kingdom.”
