GOVERNMENT pledges to speed up deportations in light of the Reading terror attack will indirectly punish many other migrants, a prominent anti-racist campaigner told the Morning Star.  

Ministers have renewed promises to make it easier to deport immigrants with criminal convictions after it emerged that the suspect of Saturday’s brutal attack in Reading is a Libyan refugee who has served time in jail. 

Khairi Saadallah, 25, was arrested in connection with the fatal stabbing of three people and the injuring of three others at around 7pm on Saturday in a Reading park. Police are treating the incident as a terror attack. 

Two of the victims have now been identified as US-born Joe Ritchie-Bennett, 39, and 36-year-old secondary school teacher James Furlong. 

The suspected attacker is believed to have served prison sentences for minor offences after arriving in Britain as a refugee from the Libyan civil war. 

Whitehall said the attack “emboldened” plans to reform the asylum system and speed up deportations, with Security Minister James Brokenshire saying yesterday that he was “looking at ways the laws can be strengthened” against foreign national offenders. 

However prominent anti-racist campaigner and Black Activists Rising Against Cuts co-founder Zita Holbourne stressed that immigration policy “should not be a factor” in this case. 

“Obviously what this individual has done is horrific but effectively what they’re saying is because of this one individual, they’re now going to target and punish many other people who are migrants in the UK, who may have come as small children,” she told the Morning Star. 

The policy of automatic deportation of immigrants who have served a minimum sentence of 12 months came under the spotlight earlier this year when the Home Office attempted to deport around 50 men to Jamaica, claiming they were all “serious criminals.”

However, it emerged that many had come to the country as children, had one-time drug offences or had been groomed into county-lines gangs. 

Bail for Immigration Detainees director Celia Clarke said that it was “a particularly crass form of political opportunism that seeks to capitalise on a very recent tragedy, about which little is known, to further a racist agenda.”

She warned that Britain’s deportation laws were already “unjust, unfair and cruel, and rip people from their families and communities. Plans to ‘speed up’ deportations will disproportionately affect black people whose home is in the UK and who the government sees as easy targets.

“It is disgraceful that the government would make such statements at a time when the spotlight is on structural racism in the UK, and within the Home Office, and when one would hope that the cruelty of these systems would instead be examined and dismantled.”

And Ms Holbourne said that calls to strengthen deportation policies on Windrush Day, when the government had yet to implement changes to ensure the scandal was never repeated, was “horrific” and “really inappropriate.” 

“There shouldn’t be any deportation conducted until they’ve addressed all the issues relating to Windrush … because it means that people slip through the gaps,” she said. 

The government has yet to implement the recommendations of the Windrush Lessons Learned review, which suggested that foreign national offenders who arrived in Britain as children should not be deported.