wenty-two-year-old Osime Brown has lived in this country since he was four. Whatever the law may say, he is British: he has spent the majority of his life on UK soil and has the vaguest memories of Jamaica, the country in which he was born. Yet Brown, who has autism and a learning age of between six and seven, now faces deportation because he was jailed in 2018 for the robbery of a friend’s mobile phone – something he denies responsibility for. Despite all the platitudes and regrets expressed in the aftermath of the Windrush scandal, here is the unapologetic racism of the British justice system. After serving his sentence, Brown, a black man born overseas, will receive a second punishment that would not be imposed on someone born in the UK who committed the same offence. His family fear that this vulnerable young man will not survive deportation, and given several deportees are known to have since died in Jamaica, this is hardly groundless. His distraught mother tells me that he has asked whether he can get the bus to visit her when he is sent to Jamaica. More than 100 public figures have rallied to halt his deportation, but Brown’s case is hardly unique. Here is the combined impact of noxious legislation passed by New Labour and the Tories alike. Until 2007, the government had discretion over who was removed from the country, but then the Borders Act introduced a new system of mandatory automatic deportation. “That ripped any discretion or proportionality out of the system,” as Bella Sankey, director of the charity Detention Action, tells me. In 2014, the then-home secretary, Theresa May, made it more difficult to resist deportation under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the “right to respect for private and family life”. Now, parents can be routinely deported and snatched away from their children in all but the most exceptional cases. Many of Sankey’s clients are men with young children: when their fathers are released from prison, they are barred from working because of their deportation orders, and carry out caring responsibilities while mothers – as the sole breadwinners – work multiple jobs to keep the family financially afloat. When those fathers are deported, mothers are left alone to hold together families, practically and financially. There are many other cases of injustice colliding with racism. Twenty-four-year-old twins Darrell and Darren Roberts were both born in this country, and taken into care at age 13 following the death of their mother and uncle, after which they spent time in jail. They are now facing deportation to separate Caribbean islands, where they have no relatives, once they have finished their terms. Sankey has another client born in St Thomas’ hospital with a birth certificate issued by Brixton town hall: a young adult the authorities have spent years trying to deport to Sierra Leone. “You can be deported to a country you’ve never visited with no ability to make a new life there,” she tells me. Vulnerable young black men – whether they are autistic, have learning difficulties or have spent childhoods in care – end up sucked into the justice system, which unduly punishes them for not being British citizens. Brown’s family has severe concerns over his conviction, but whatever the reasons he ended up in prison, deporting him to a country he knows nothing about and in which he lacks a support network is a callous act of cruelty. This is where the moral panic over migrants has taken us. Successive governments have sought to gain political capital by both legitimising and whipping up the most base prejudices, which is a convenient distraction from drivers of crime that they are responsible for – such as the decimation of youth services and the lack of employment opportunities for young people in general. The case of Osime Brown must lead to the wholesale reassessment of the justice system that should have been heralded by Windrush but never came. Labour must confront its own dark past and take the lead: despite justified frustration over the leadership’s failure to effectively challenge deportations earlier this month, campaigners are encouraged by private noises from the party’s home affairs team, and it is notable that the Birmingham MP Liam Byrne – a former Home Office minister committed to a punitive approach on immigration – has written a letter to the home secretary urging an overhaul of deportations. That will require courage, but a case like Brown’s could help turn hard-nosed attitudes around. As his mother tearfully tells me: “I want justice for everyone going through this.”