ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2013, a van with the slogan ‘In the UK illegally? Go Home or Face Arrest’ was driven through six ethnically diverse London boroughs. The van was part of a pilot scheme, named ‘Operation Vaken’, carried out by the UK Home Office, the government department responsible for immigration. The stated aim of Operation Vaken was to encourage people whose immigration papers were not in order to come forward and take part in the government’s long-standing ‘voluntary returns’ scheme: to ‘go home’ to the countries from which they had migrated, with the threat that if they did not, they would be sought out, arrested and deported anyway. This accompanied targeted and high-profile immigration raids on public transport hubs and workplaces, which were publicised on the Home Office’s Twitter account with pictures of people being arrested by immigration officers and pushed into the back of enforcement vans, with the hashtag #immigrationoffender. Later that summer, further posters were displayed inside immigration reporting centres in Glasgow and Hounslow, where asylum seekers were faced with images of aeroplanes with the slogan ‘This plane can take you home. We can book the tickets.’
