As the Taliban advanced on Kabul, we received increasing numbers of calls from people in communities across the North West. They were desperate for help for family members still in Afghanistan. Over the last five years we’ve worked with hundreds of people from Afghanistan. 75 were children on their own…
The government’s new Nationality and Borders Bill will criminalise the RNLI and Afghan women fleeing the Taliban. We need to throw it out. Here’s how. It is impossible to forget the scenes at Kabul airport this summer. Desperate husbands, wives, parents, daughters, sons, trying to save loved ones and flee…
Overnight on 1 July 2021, tens of thousands of people lost their right to be in the UK lawfully. Today we’ve published our new report exploring what’s happened in the weeks since the 30th June EU Settlement Scheme deadline and who in the North West has been left behind. The…
Who we are GMIAU are proud to be joining the campaign Greater Manchester Patients Not Passports (GMPNP) to end the Hostile Environment within the NHS. We have formed a coalition with local organisations Medact Manchester and Greater Manchester Keep Our NHS Public (GMKONP) to fight for equal access to healthcare, which has even more relevance during the current…
“Experiencing hair loss in addition to irritation and pain with her skin”; “developing a lack of trust”; “feeling worried the majority of the time”; “feeling forgotten”. These are the words of social workers, talking about the children they care for and how they are emotionally and physically falling apart because…
Back in March, our chief Executive Denise spoke to the Legal Education Foundation about her experiences of the pandemic and lockdowns. She said, “The last year has shown that the core of the organisation works. It isn’t about a building. It is based on communication.” Together, GMIAU staff took 3,097…
In 2019, the government launched the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) for European/EEA nationals living in the UK to safeguard their rights after Brexit immigration changes. It’s supposed to ensure that anyone who was in the UK before 31 December 2020 can secure their immigration status. The Prime Minister pledged to…
In our 2021 report, published last week, we looked at the impact of the Covid-19 on our work – its impact on us as an organisation and on the people we support throughout the North West. Looking at the period from March 2020-March 2021, we found that the pandemic and…
The past year and the Covid-19 pandemic has shone new light on the collective need to keep our communities safe. We’ve seen measures, like the Everyone In campaign, protect more people from destitution and homelessness than was thought politically possible. This is because it was understood that homelessness is a…
A wholesale attack on the right to seek safety in the UK Today we’ve submitted our evidence to the consultation on Priti Patel’s New Plan for Immigration. Based on over thirty years’ experience providing free immigration advice in the North West, we believe the ideas in the plan are rehashed,…
