Sentina Bristol, whose son died after being sacked for not having a passport, says May should quit

The mother of a Windrush citizen who died suddenly last month after being classified as an illegal immigrant and sacked from his job believes the stress caused by his immigration problems was responsible for his death.



Dexter Bristol, who was 57 when he died, moved from Grenada to the UK when he was eight in 1968, to join his mother who was working as an NHS nurse, and spent the rest of his life in the UK. He was sacked from his cleaning job last year because he had no passport, and was denied benefits because officials did not believe he was in the country legally.

He spent the last year of life trying to untangle his immigration situation, repeatedly attempting and failing to get the Home Office to acknowledge that he was not an illegal immigrant. Until he was sacked, he had no idea there was any problem with his immigration status.

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He was born a British subject in Grenada, but had never been able to get a British passport, and struggled to gather the extensive documentation required by officials to prove that he was not an overstayer. On 31 March he collapsed in the street outside his home and died. Ahead of an upcoming inquest, the cause of death is unknown.

His mother, Sentina Bristol, said it was hard to articulate how angry she felt. “I think Theresa May should resign. I don’t enjoy saying that. This situation has to be amended,” she said. “My son is British. We didn’t come here illegally.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dexter Bristol. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Dexter’s lawyer, Jacqueline McKenzie, said Home Office delays in processing his requests for his records contributed to his spiralling depression, and were a clear breach of its own rules. “I’m heartbroken. This is the worst case I’ve ever seen. We went to extreme lengths to try to get this sorted out,” she said.

Over the past few months, she had watched her client becoming more and more desperate. “He would come into the office, sit down and say: ‘Will I ever get my passport?’” she said. “We saw him get more and more depressed and anxious. Whatever the cause of his death, he died being denied an immigration status which was rightfully his. The last conversation we had was that he just wanted to work, otherwise what was the point?”

Mrs Bristol said she was horrified by the unfolding Windrush scandal, particularly because she felt that it illustrated racism within the government. “This is racism. He was the victim of their policies, and it is a tragedy. I’m hoping no one will go through what I’m going though now,” she said. “There was a lot of racism when I came here, but I was young, I could handle it. People would call you ‘black’; I just ignored it. This is worse, this is the government. They are intelligent people, they are people of power. We expect better from them.”

Q&A What is the Windrush deportation crisis? Show Hide Who are the Windrush generation? They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948. What happened to them? An estimated 50,000 people faced the risk of deportation if they had never formalised their residency status and did not have the required documentation to prove it. Why now? It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary, to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of people’s citizenship or immigration status. Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status? Some children, often travelling on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973. What did the government try and do to resolve the problem? A Home Office team was set up to ensure Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents would no longer find themselves classified as being in the UK illegally. But a month after one minister promised the cases would be resolved within two weeks, many remained destitute. In November 2018 home secretary Sajid Javid revealed that at least 11 Britons who had been wrongly deported had died. In April 2019 the government agreed to pay up to £200m in compensation. Photograph: Douglas Miller/Hulton Archive

Dexter travelled to the UK with his mother, on her British subject passport. At the time, Grenada was a British colony. She had moved to Britain before him, leaving him with his grandparents, until she had saved up enough money to bring him over, working first as a seamstress and later as a nurse at Queen Mary’s hospital in London. “The Caribbean was under British rule when he was born. When I moved to Britain, I felt like I was leaving home and coming home. It was all the same.”

Dexter had his benefits terminated at the end of 2016 because he could not prove that he had the right to be in the UK. He managed to find a cleaning job in early 2017, but was sacked when his employers realised he had no passport. He tried to get new work, but no one would hire him without a passport. New immigration laws mean that employers face £20,000 fines if they are found to have hired someone without papers.

Play Video 2:00 Who are the Windrush generation? – video explainer

He found it hard to get by with no money. “I would give him £20 when I saw him. I didn’t realise his benefits had been cut off, but I could see he was very depressed. He was very upset about losing his job – I could see the change in him. He went into himself,” his mother said. As the process took longer and longer to resolve, he became extremely angry, she said.

On the night of his death, police officers rang on her doorbell. “I said: ‘What have I done?’ They said: ‘It’s not you, it’s Dexter, he’s dead.’ Just like that, they said it. I just blacked out,” she said.

She had tried to get him a passport in the 1970s, but the Home Office rejected her request because, although her passport included his name, it had no photograph of him and was not signed by him.

“That was the excuse they gave me, but there was no place in the passport for a photograph of him, and no line for a second signature. I was very angry – it had his name and his date of birth. There wasn’t meant to be a photograph of him,” she said. But she did not worry greatly about the rejection. “I thought I could sort it out for him later. No one expected this country to turn into what it is now,” she said.

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When Dexter lost his job, he telephoned her to ask where his passport was. “I had to say, ‘Well, you haven’t got one.’” They began the long process of trying to sort out his status. First they went together to the Grenada high commission to try to get a Grenadian passport, then contacted McKenzie, at McKenzie, Beute and Pope, an immigration lawyer who is dealing with a growing number of such cases.

They began to try to gather the enormous amount of evidence required by the Home Office. “We found it very difficult. All the time he was very worried about being deported. He didn’t have anyone in left in Grenada. He hadn’t been since he was a child,” Mrs Bristol said. “They asked for school records, but he’s a grown man, and we’ve moved from house to house, we haven’t kept those things.” In any case, his primary school and secondary school had both closed, so it was impossible to get records from them.

Paying tribute to her son, she said: “He was a very quiet, very intelligent man. He was very easygoing. He never got into any trouble, he was never in trouble with the police – he wasn’t even ever in a fight in school.”

She said she had not watched May’s apology earlier this week for the problems suffered by the Windrush generation. “Since this happened, I switch off when she comes on. I can’t listen to her. I’m in shock.”

She was aware that the Grenadian prime minister was due to meet the home secretary, Amber Rudd, on Thursday, as part of the Commonwealth heads of government meeting, and said she hoped he would intervene on behalf of her son. “He has to tell them to do something to sort this out.”

McKenzie said Dexter had died just as she was finally beginning to feel that she was making some progress in resolving things for him. Over the months she had spent working on his case, she became so determined to help him that three times during trips – for family reasons – to Grenada, she visited the local records office there on his behalf to try to source papers for him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jacqueline McKenzie, the immigration and asylum lawyer acting for the Bristols. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

“We’ve done about a dozen of these cases over the past couple of years since these checks have been required by employers, banks, NHS, schools and government departments. This case showed us the extent of the problem – there was so little paper trail. The requirement to prove all this stuff was really ridiculous,” McKenzie said. “Digital national insurance records only go back to 1976. His medical records only started in the 1980s, and the NHS couldn’t explain where the earlier ones were – they might have been purged.”

She said the Home Office had breached its own policies in the handling of the case, failing to respond to the fixed deadlines for responses set out in its own rules. She believes that the delay contributed to Dexter’s spiralling depression about his situation.

She said she sent the Home Office a request to call up Dexter’s records on 16 January, and she knew the request had been received because the £10 cheque for the fee was cashed. The Home Office has a 40-day window to respond, she said. “That deadline came and went and we heard nothing from them. That’s a breach,” she said.

She said the decision to destroy Windrush-era landing cards may have contributed to the difficulties they had in proving he was here legally. “If we can get them, landing cards are useful.”

The week he died, she had had something of a breakthrough because they received some documentation about him from the local authority where he grew up. “I wrote to him on the Thursday before Good Friday to say: we are going to fight this and we are going to win it. But he died before he got that letter,” she said.

An inquest into Dexter’s death was opened at Poplar coroner’s court on 5 April and adjourned to July. Mrs Bristol says she was not informed that it was happening. The funeral cannot be held until further toxicology tests are completed.

A Home Office spokesperson offered condolences “at this clearly difficult time”. The spokesperson added that Dexter had not made an application to the Home Office and “was not the subject of any removal action”.

However, his family say the reason he had made no application was because he was struggling to gather all the necessary documents before paying the expensive application fee.