Human rights charities condemn home secretary’s comments about MDP Wethersfield and say the site is ‘acutely harmful’

Human rights campaigners have criticised the home secretary for suggesting that asylum seekers at a controversial mass accommodation site are lying about being suicidal in the hope of being moved off the former military base.

ITV News on Friday night reported on a “severe mental health crisis” at Wethersfield in Essex, with many incidents of suicide and self-harm including five to 10 suicide attempts and 10 of self-harm in January this year alone – the highest level since the site opened.

Migrants seek redress for ‘immense distress’ from deportations now thrown into chaos by election announcement

Asylum seekers detained by the Home Office and threatened with deportation to Rwanda are set to take legal action against the government after Rishi Sunak admitted that no flights will take place before the general election.

The Home Office started raiding accommodation and detaining people who arrived at routine immigration-reporting appointments on 29 April in a nationwide push codenamed Operation Vector.

The government’s safety of Rwanda bill finally passed into law in April. But, with the announcement last week of a general election, the Conservative ‘dream’ of deportation flights taking off might never happen. So what has the bill achieved? And what does it mean for those it has targeted? The Guardian’s John Harris hears what life is really like for migrants in the UK

Almost 33,000 submissions to the Home Office for visa fee waivers remain outstanding, the highest number ever recorded

Vulnerable families across the UK are facing “fear and uncertainty” due to a Home Office backlog in processing their visa fee waiver applications, leaving them in a “perpetual state of limbo”, according to migrant charities.

A record 18,528 applications for visa fee waivers were submitted to the Home Office in the first quarter of this year, but almost 33,000 submissions remain outstanding – the highest number recorded by the Home Office.

Committee says department pressed ahead with plans without adequate understanding of what would be required

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The Home Office has made “unacceptable and avoidable mistakes” in its haste to use disused barracks and a giant barge to house asylum seekers, parliament’s spending watchdog has concluded.

The public accounts committee said the department “does not have a credible plan” to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and has little to show for hundreds of millions of pounds spent so far on the policy or its accommodation plans.

After the Post Office, infected blood, Grenfell Tower, Windrush and more, what could fall on the next prime minister’s watch?

Reckonings with shocking national scandals have lately become a defining feature of British public life.

Some, like the Post Office and infected blood scandals, have erupted from cases of wrongdoing hidden in plain sight. Again and again, whistleblowers are shown to have been sidelined, ignored and dismissed.

Appeal allowed Sudharsan Ithayachandran to return to UK to be with his family, but he died in Sri Lanka while awaiting visa

The family of a man who died abroad after being wrongly deported by the UK Home Office have blamed the department for causing delays that stopped him being reunited with his children.

Sudharsan Ithayachandran, 41, was deported from the UK to Sri Lanka on 24 December 2019 – his wedding anniversary – after admitting to working illegally at Tesco and using false documents.

University informs Home Office and withdraws sponsorship from those struggling with fees after drop in value of naira

Nigerian students at a UK university say they are devastated after some were thrown off their course and ordered to leave the UK when they got behind on their fees because of a currency crash.

Teesside University withdrew students who missed their fee instalments and informed the Home Office, after some students’ savings were wiped out when the value of Nigeria’s naira crashed.

John Glen, Cabinet Office minister, tells Commons that those infected will be able to claim compensation as well as the estates of those who have died

• Infected blood scandal victims to get compensation payments before end of year

Gove claims that the anti-Israel protests that have sprung up on university campuses around the world have not appeared in a vacuum, and are the product of “years of ideological radicalisation”.

He says the decolonisation narrative is attractive to authoritarian states, because the iddea that “the success of liberal Western nations is built on plunder” undermines their legitimacy.

There are no BDS campaigns directed against Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime guilty of killing more Muslims in living memory than any other.

There are no student encampments, urging university administrators to cut all ties with China given what is happening in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, or what happened in Tibet.

Former home secretary used ‘Henry VIII powers’ to lower threshold for police restricting protests

The former home secretary Suella Braverman acted unlawfully in making it easier for the police to criminalise peaceful protests, the high court has ruled.

She was found to have both acted outside her powers and to have failed to consult properly over regulations that would be likely to increase prosecutions of protesters by a third.

Anthony Olubunmi George, 61, has been refused leave to remain despite living most of his adult life in Britain

A disabled man who has lived in the UK for 38 years has been threatened with removal from the UK by the Home Office.

Anthony Olubunmi George, 61, came to the UK at the age of 24 in 1986 from Nigeria. He has not left the UK since and has no criminal convictions. In 2019, he had two strokes, which left him with problems with speech and mobility.

Nelson Shardey, 74, became tearful on hearing of support for effort to gain settled status after 50 years in UK

A retired 74-year-old newsagent who has lived in the UK for nearly 50 years said “tears were running” from his eyes after strangers fundraised more than £30,000 to support his legal fight to remain in the country.

Nelson Shardey, who has been described as a Merseyside “local legend”, is pursuing a legal challenge against the Home Office after he was refused indefinite leave to remain, despite living and working in the UK since 1977.

Campaigners say move to electronic permits by end of the year is a ‘recipe for disaster’ that could leave immigrants without proof of status

Lawyers and migrant rights campaigners have warned that the government is heading for a repeat of the Windrush scandal after imposing a “cliff edge” deadline for immigrants to switch to new digital visas.

By the end of this year an estimated 500,000 or more non-EU immigrants with leave to remain in the UK will need to replace their physical biometric residence permits (BRPs) – which demonstrate proof of their right to reside, rent, work and claim benefits – with digital e-visas.

Hundreds of protesters prevented an attempt to collect asylum seekers from a south London hotel and transfer them to the Bibby Stockholm barge. The Guardian witnessed crowds blocking the bus and the road outside the Best Western hotel in Peckham before police were able to move in and break up the protest. The bus eventually left the area after seven hours, with no asylum seekers onboard

London protesters block transfer of asylum seekers to Bibby Stockholm