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LONDON — Jamaica-born Beverley Boothe followed her parents to Britain in 1979. She says her mother and father both had U.K. citizenship. She hasn't left the country since.

So it was a shock when Boothe, now 56, got a letter informing her that she would be deported from where she’s studied, worked and raised five children.

“This is my life. Here. I’ve got my children, I’ve got my grandkids,” she told NBC News.

Boothe isn't alone. Thousands of similar cases have emerged, unleashing a scandal that has engulfed British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Other Caribbean-born U.K. residents, including many who are elderly, say they have been threatened with deportation, with some detained and denied access to health care and benefits. The revelations have prompted accusations that the government has betrayed a generation of black Britons who helped rebuild the country following the devastation wreaked by World War II.

They became known as the "Windrush" generation, after the ship that brought the first 492 passengers from Jamaica, Trinidad and other islands to Britain in 1948. A total of 500,000 workers and their families were eventually invited to the U.K. from former colonies and granted citizenship as subjects of the empire.

The Empire Windrush in Southampton, England, in 1954. PA / AP file

Many of them have been in the country so long that they assumed they would never need to present documentation to prove they were in the U.K. legally.

The scandal was exacerbated last week when it emerged that many of the Windrush generation’s original landing documents had been deliberately destroyed by the U.K.’s interior ministry, known as the Home Office, in 2009. In many cases, this was a key piece of evidence needed to prove an individual’s citizenship status.

“The Home Office destroyed the evidence that gives people the opportunity to say, 'Look, of course I am British,'” opposition lawmaker David Lammy said. “It’s very, very hard when you ask these people in their 60s to go back to the 1950s and 1960s and find their documentation."

Critics blame official incompetence and callousness, as well as an immigration crackdown introduced by May when she was in charge of the Home Office from 2010 until 2016. May pledged to create a "hostile environment" in order to deal with illegal immigration, but many now say the policy has created problems for those in the country legally, too.

As a result, rather than simply being certified by officials at the border, peoples’ status now has to be checked by banks, landlords, employers and others.

David Lammy is a lawmaker with the opposition Labour Party. His parents came to the U.K. from the former British colony of Guyana. Stefan Rousseau / PA Wire/PA Images file

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"People face fairly intrusive immigration checks in every aspect of their lives," said Satbir Singh, the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, a British legal charity. "Many people who have every right to be in the U.K. don’t necessarily have all the paperwork."

Critics say that as a result of the demand for paperwork, the Windrush generation and their children have lost jobs and been denied access to life-saving cancer treatment, made homeless and, as in Boothe’s case, threatened with deportation.

Boothe says her parents arrived from Jamaica as Commonwealth citizens — members of Britain's overseas empire that largely dissolved after the Second World War who were legally allowed to come to the U.K. as citizens of the "United Kingdom and Colonies." Boothe followed them as a teenager in 1979, on a Jamaican passport.

In 1980, Boothe said she was given indefinite leave to remain, which granted her the right to live, work and study in Britain, as a result of her parents' status.