The latest twist in the Windrush scandal proves something unsavoury about the UK's immigration system

A scant handful of apologies will reassure no one that the Home Office is capable of protecting the rights of those under its care

So there we have it. Despite the Windrush scandal having claimed the scalp of Amber Rudd, resurrected the anti-racist credentials of Yvette “unfair impacts of immigration” Cooper and even elicited a UK commitment to celebrating National Windrush Day every year, this week the government has made clear that its intention is to do nothing more than the bare minimum to resolve the Home Office crisis.

Despite acknowledging that at least 83 British citizens with Caribbean heritage may have been wrongfully deported (with Home Office figures suggesting the number could be more than 160 when taking into account those who were detained but not deported), home secretary Sajid Javid has pledged to apologise to just 18 families. Windrush citizens have still faced delays in confirming their right to remain, and are unable to work, study or claim benefits during this period.

One man was left homeless after his arrest in May when he went to collect his biometric card at Lunar House in Croydon. Another woman was reported to be left financially destitute while she and her 12-year-old child await the regularisation of her status. In his maiden speech as home secretary, Javid promised to “do right” by the Windrush generations, insisting that “it’s not just about personnel change; it’s also about action, and that’s exactly what you’ll be seeing from my department”. He has shamefully delivered neither.

Instead of expediting the regularisation of Windrush citizens’ status, allocating funding to support those in limbo or offering the public greater transparency with regards to how the Home Office plans on reforming the unjust “deport first, appeal later” approach, championed by Theresa May, the government has decided to prioritise faffing about with the metrics for calculating how many people it will say sorry to.

A Home Office unit was assigned to review 11,800 instances of people of Caribbean Commonwealth origin being detained or deported since 2002. The 18 cases deemed worthy of an apology have been identified by the taskforce as being those “most likely to have suffered detriment because their right to be in the UK was not recognised”. This excludes 74 cases in which someone was deported because they lost their right to remain indefinitely in the UK as they appeared to have lived overseas for two or more years; and more worryingly, excludes an undisclosed number of people deported after having been convicted of a crime, despite still technically being British citizens.

The exclusion of convicted criminals from the category of the deserving migrant was always going to hit migrants with Caribbean heritage particularly hard. Coverage of the Home Office scandal has tended to emphasise the exceptionality of both the “failed” implementation of policy and of the Windrush generations themselves. From Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony in 2012 to the pages of otherwise vehemently anti-immigration tabloids, the Windrush generations have come to embody a romanticised image of how Britain came to embrace her former colonial subjects.

“They came to Britain after the Second World War, the country many of them had fought for, to help her and themselves prosper [...] Their music has written the rhythm of our lives. We danced to tunes inspired by those first played thousands of miles away and ate food marinated in herbs we had barely heard of and spices we had never tasted before. Their cultures have enriched us”, wrote Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat. But as Paul Gilroy observed in his seminal examination of UK race relations, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Caribbean migrants were stereotyped as lewd and lascivious, socially disruptive and impossible to assimilate. Windrush migrants were overrepresented in impoverished conditions, and subject to draconian and often racist policing as a result. An institutionally racist British state criminalised the Windrush generations once, and the Home Office punished them twice.

The Home Office exclusion of convicted criminals from records of the wrongly deported is more than just a particularly egregious example of bureaucratic goalpost moving – it is a fundamental assault on the integrity of our justice system.

As pointed out in a 2012 article from the Institute of Race Relations, the use of deportations after criminal conviction undermines the role of judges in “balancing the wider public interest such as preventing crime and upholding the rights and safety of others, against the rights and needs of all the members of an offender’s family, including innocent spouses and children”. It effectively makes all migrants to the UK second class citizens, as foreign-born offenders effectively face punishment over and above their mandated sentence, and British born offenders do not.

What does it say about the overall rehabilitative function of the justice system if we cannot reintegrate foreign-born offenders into society after they’ve done their time? The use of immigration removals as a punitive measure in the UK is utterly at odds with the principle of equality before the law.

With Brexit looming ever closer, it is unlikely that Britain’s immigration bureaucracy will find itself with a lightened workload anytime soon. There are already widespread fears among EU nationals that the process for applying for settled status will be prohibitively difficult to navigate, and the combination of the government’s slapstick approach to EU negotiations and the Windrush fiasco has had a corrosive effect on many migrants’ faith that their right to remain will be protected once Britain leaves the European Union.

UK immigration policy created a hierarchy privileging EU citizens over Commonwealth, but what Windrush has shown is that rights don’t tend to trickle down. Precarity, however, tends to get rolled up from the most vulnerable racialised categories in society to previously secure classes of migrant.

A scant handful of apologies will reassure no one that the Home Office is capable of protecting the rights of those under its care. Forget National Windrush Day and mealy mouthed remorse – the government must make sacking off its commitment to the hostile environment policy a matter of priority.