The 2018 Windrush scandal brought to the fore an ongoing immigration injustice in the UK. Immigrants and their families, often of Caribbean descent, were wrongfully detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and unlawfully deported. Many victims lost their jobs, and their homes, and were denied benefits to which they were entitled, including health coverage. 

In 2019, the British government set up the Windrush Compensation Scheme to compensate victims and their families. Because uptake of compensation was slow, a team of eight law firms, including White & Case, began collaborating with the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in 2021 to help people who are eligible for compensation navigate the process. We now work with the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, the new charity lead for the initiative. 

Our lawyers were assigned two individual cases. The work involved building a forensic history of the victims including evidence of any negative impacts on their work, any housing or other benefits withheld, and the psychological trauma they suffered, as well as collecting the official documentation needed to support the claims.

London partners Melissa Butler and James Holden said volunteering to help the claimants was an easy decision. The issue had personal importance to both: Melissa is an immigrant to the UK, and James is the son of an immigrant. 

The work has been emotional, with client sessions sometimes cut short to give the victims time to compose themselves. “It is a wrong that needs to be righted, and if we can play a small part to help with that, that’s a good thing,” said Holden.

We started working on the cases in late June 2021, and it is expected that the first claims will be submitted in early 2022. 

Beyond the clear benefit of having a lawyer from a top-tier law firm working on the claims, “the victims get the same dogged determination we bring to all our clients,” said Butler. “They have someone personally invested in maximizing the compensation and giving them the opportunity to get some justice from what would otherwise be a very difficult, complicated process.”

Photo by Jim Grover www.windrushportraitofageneration.com
Family portraits in a Jamaican home in London in the distinctive frames like those profiled by photographer Jim Grover in his 2018 exhibit “Windrush: Portrait of a Generation.”