Against their will, the UK government is deporting young Britons and putting their lives at risk

After being imprisoned for dealing drugs, Adnan Hashi was forcibly removed from the country to Mogadishu. One wonders how many other young people who came of age here are now suffering thousands of miles from home

As an LBC presenter, I love a good debate. When I began work in 2016 at a station that has increasingly become a popular alternative to the BBC and that brands itself as “Leading Britain’s Conversation”, I was immediately encouraged to push out my opinions. Admittedly, it isn’t always easy to resist the temptation to sit on the fence, but at the turn of the year I was confronted by a story that made me angrier than anything I had covered in over two years.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have many memories from when I was six. In fact, I’m not sure I can pinpoint with any certainty a single moment from my seventh year. Yet Adnan Hashi was just six years old when he came to Britain as a refugee from war-torn Somalia. His father had been killed in 1998 and Adnan’s family was given indefinite leave to remain in 2004.

Fast forward more than a decade and a 17 year old Adnan was arrested for drug dealing. He pleaded guilty to supplying crack cocaine and cannabis. Now, I’m not a fan of drug dealers. I have never once taken drugs myself, but I have experienced first-hand the horrors suffered by some of those who have – including death. Adnan was sentenced to two years in a young offenders’ institution and served his time in Feltham, west London.

What happened next, though, shames our country. Because he was a refugee who had received a custodial sentence of 24 months, the Home Office revoked his refugee status and considered him eligible for deportation. After spending almost a year in Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, not known to be a place for the faint hearted, Adnan was sent “back” to Mogadishu last year.

We only know of his case because a newspaper journalist happened to be on the same flight to Istanbul during the first leg of his journey. The Sunday Times reported his terror as he struggled, handcuffed to his seat, with all his might: “Help!” he yelled, sweat pouring off him. “They’re taking me to Mogadishu.” He was guarded by five immigration officers, including a medic.

Adnan, of course, wasn’t only terrified, he had by now a strong south London accent. He was brought up in this country and, to my mind, is as British as anyone reading this article. According to his lawyer, he had been fully entitled to British citizenship but the process was too expensive for his family. So the British state has exiled one of its own. To a city devastated by conflict.

You don’t need me to tell you how Adnan has been getting on in Mogadishu. How would you be getting on in Mogadishu? He was robbed at gunpoint on his first day and after making friends with someone he witnessed their murder. He has been living in the garden of a woman who took pity on him after watching him being attacked but he has been surviving on leftovers and been told he can’t stay long. To compound his problems, he is a member of an ethnic grouping that has been persecuted in Somalia and his family has been unable to contact him in recent days.

There are, predictably, those who do not share my compassion for a foreign-born class A drug dealer. But this shouldn’t be a question of compassion. It should be a question of law. Britain should not be sending refugees, least of all those who arrived here as children, back to countries where their lives are in danger. In fact, I’d go further. No one who came to this country as a child should be forcibly returned to their place of birth.

We rightly wince when we watch a film like Papillon that tells the story of a Parisian criminal cast off to the penal colony of French Guiana where he suffered unimaginable torment. We no longer dump our own “convicts” on Australia. But we do send people who grew up in Britain to Mogadishu. One wonders how many other young people who came of age here are now suffering thousands of miles from home.

I have spoken to Adnan’s lawyer who is fighting his corner and hoping to overturn the decision to deport him. But whether or not the case is won on strictly legal grounds, the British government should repatriate Adnan Hashi. Even if your heart is hardened to this young man, surely you can at least accept that he is our problem, not Somalia’s. He went off the rails and committed his crimes here. Like it or not, he is one of us.

Matthew Stadlen is a radio presenter on LBC