SEVERAL MPs have joined those calling on the Home Office to cancel next week’s “disproportionate and discriminatory” deportation flight to Jamaica.

The department is seeking to remove dozens of Jamaican nationals on August 11, including some who have lived in Britain since childhood, on the basis that they have criminal convictions. 

But detainees booked on the flight told the Morning Star that they have already served their time and consider that the threat of deportation amounts to a “double punishment.” 

Labour MP Diane Abbott said she was shocked to learn that the Home Office is planning more deportations to Jamaica when the last such flight to the Caribbean island left as recently as last December. 

“These deportations reinforce the government’s ongoing hostile environment policy and they are wrong,” Ms Abbott said. 

At least five men have had their tickets for the flight cancelled, but dozens still face removal. 

They include Hugh, 64, who has lived in Britain for 20 years with his wife from the Windrush generation. His local MP, Labour’s Kate Osamor, is campaigning to halt his deportation. She told the Morning Star that the case of her constituent was “particlarly shocking.” 

“In 2019 Hugh’s 12-year-old daughter died as a result of medical negligence,” she said. “The Home Office subsequently refused him leave to remain on the grounds that he had ‘no British children.’

“Hugh therefore now faces deportation as a result of his daughter’s death. If the deportation goes ahead, he will be unable to visit her grave or grieve for her alongside his wife.”

“These cases show the Home Office hasn't changed since the Windrush scandal and continues to terrorise members of the Windrush generation and their families.”

Also calling for the flight to be cancelled, Ms Osamor’s fellow Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy branded the deportations a “discriminatory and disproportionate double punishment for people who have committed minor offences and grown up in the UK.

“Given the recent data revealing the disproportionate forced removal of people to Jamaica, the government must urgently cancel this flight and suspend all mass deportation flights until they can prove these do not breach equalities law,” she added. 

Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe rejected Home Office claims that removals are intended to make Britain safer, alleging that they are “instead designed to stoke the flames of racial hatred and division.”