Pressure is building on the Home Office over its failure to find 49 people deported to Commonwealth countries who may have been wrongfully expelled to inform them of the Windrush taskforce.

The group, which had been held in UK detention centres, were flown to Ghana and Nigeria between March and September last year, before the Windrush scandal erupted.

“I think it’s the moral responsibility of the government to track them down,” said the Green perty MP, Caroline Lucas, who learned through a series of parliamentary questions to ministers that the Home Office had made no “specific attempt” to inform the 49 that the taskforce existed.

The Home Office minister Caroline Nokes said those concerned could visit a government website for information. In response to earlier questions from Lucas, she said that all individuals were notified of the reasons why they were liable for removal and the destination for removal before the deportation was enforced.

Lucas told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday: “In all of my questions, they have been unable to assure me that none of the people on that plane were from the Windrush generation.

“We are expected to assume that those 49 people are going to mysteriously find out when they are in the middle of Nigeria or Ghana that there is a Home Office website that they can go to and if they went to that website they could find out about the Windrush taskforce, the Windrush settlement scheme and make an application.”

Her concerns were echoed by Satbir Singh, the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. “If the Home Office has the capacity to deny somebody their rights, to separate them from their loved ones and remove them from the country, surely it has the capacity to find them, to apologise and to help them come home,” he said.

“This isn’t a question of capacity alone, it’s a question of decency, and yet another example of a department going out of its way to avoid doing the right thing.”

The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said the cases highlighted how “reckless and incompetent” the government’s immigration policy was.

She said: “The Windrush generation includes many more than just those who came from the Caribbean, as in this case. People from almost every Commonwealth country have been treated badly under this government’s hostile environment. It’s clear these injustices will continue if ministers don’t even know what’s going on.”

The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Ed Davey, said: “The Home Office has an obligation to every single victim of the Windrush scandal. Ministerial apologies are meaningless if they are not accompanied by action to put things right.

The Home Office admitted last month that the number of Windrush people known to have been wrongly deported or detained was likely to rise from the figure of 164 because officials had misclassified a number of affected people as criminals and excluded them from the count.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Any individual who believes they are protected under the provisions of the 1971 Immigration Act is able to contact the Windrush taskforce, who will help to identify their current status.

“We have always been clear that the Windrush scheme is not restricted to the Windrush generation or people from the Caribbean, but it is right that applicants for citizenship need to satisfy the good character and residence requirements.”