When Chishamiso Mkundi, a Zimbabwean whose asylum applications have been rejected, arrived at the Home Office’s building in Sheffield on 4 December, he thought he was attending a routine appointment so the department could “update its records”. Instead he walked into an interview room to find a Zimbabwean government official.

“This guy started by saying The UK government and the Zimbabwean government have been in discussions and they have agreed that they want to deport people back home,” he said. “So they were going to decide whether to deport people or to grant people leave to remain … It was such a shock. I was just in disbelief.”

Mkundi, 51, is one of many Zimbabweans living in the UK to have arrived at asylum reporting centres in recent months to find an official from the country they fled waiting for them. The Home Office has been condemned for pushing ahead with removal processes for Zimbabwean asylum seekers since the country’s change of government, under which there has been evidence of widespread human rights abuses.

While the previous government of Robert Mugabe refused to cooperate with British attempts to return people to Zimbabwe, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s regime appears to have a different approach.

The Home Office said “routine re-documentation” interviews with embassy officials often took place to establish the identity of an individual so that emergency travel documentation could be issued.

On Monday two Zimbabweans, Victor Mujakachi and Khuzani Ndlovu, were detained at Vulcan House in Sheffield. It is thought they could be sent back to Zimbabwe within days. Before he was detained, Mujakachi told the Guardian he had attended a Home Office interview in December and was met by a Zimbabwean embassy official who wanted to interview him.

He said he first became worried that he could be sent home when he read media reports that suggested a thawing of relations between the the two governments.

“What is happening in Zimbabwe now is so outrageous that we need to speak publicly about it,” Mujakachi said. “The situation has deteriorated so much.” Speaking from Morton Hall Immigration Removal Centre in Lincolnshire on Tuesday, he said he had been told he could be removed on 14 February.

The Guardian spoke to another Zimbabwean, who asked not to be named, who attended a Home Office centre in Hounslow at the end of January and found a Zimbabwean official waiting to speak to him.

He said he had been a campaigner for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) opposition party and decided to leave the country in 2001 after being tortured. Over the years all his applications for asylum have been rejected. “I can’t go back,” he said. “I have established our life here.”

Mkundi arrived in the UK in 2002. He was involved in the MDC from its inception in 1999, when it was set up to oppose Mugabe. He said he left Zimbabwe because he began to feel his political activism was putting his family in danger. He planned to study in the UK and then return once things felt safer.

In 2006, after studying information technology in London, the situation in Zimbabwe seemed no safer and he applied for asylum. So far he has had three claims rejected, and he has been living in legal limbo, unable to work, for more than a decade. He spends his time volunteering and playing the tuba. Until December he only had to report to the Home Office every six months. Now it is every two weeks.

“If you ask my friends, they will tell you that I’m usually a very good sleeper, but since the interview I can hardly sleep. I’m still so scared. I don’t know how much information about me [the Zimbabwean official] has got,” he said. “If I have to go back, I will not survive. That’s my honest opinion. My presence there will also endanger my family.”