Edel Anabwani came to the UK to study for her PhD – but after a paperwork error, she lost her job and now relies on the kindness of neighbours to feed her
Recently, every time Edel Anabwani sees a blue light flash across her street, she finds herself on the floor.
“I think, ‘I am being taken tonight,’” she says.
“I think, ‘I am going, the police are coming to take me to detention’, and my heart starts beating. I have started to have panic attacks these last couple of months.
“I think I will throw myself in the River Taff and who will care? It is better than living like this. But then, later when I am walking by the river, I laugh at myself – a person who throws themselves on the floor when they see lights – who am I becoming?”
As the political parties battle to outdo themselves on who can carry out the most deportations – with Nigel Farage pledging to carry out 600,000 in his first term – this is the reality of what it feels like to face being deported.
I first met Edel in 2021 when I profiled her in the Mirror as one of the heroes of the pandemic. Not only was she a care worker through the Covid crisis, she had also organised thousands of carers across the UK to argue for a Living Wage.
Her journey took her into the heart of Welsh government to meet Mark Drakeford, then First Minister of Wales. She spoke on health and social care at the Conservative Party Conference in 2022, and met the then-General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress, Baroness Frances O’Grady.
The extraordinarily energetic Edel – who comes from the beautiful Kakamega forest area of western Kenya – had come to the UK in 2014 to study for her Masters at Sussex University, then a PhD at Cardiff University where she had embraced Welsh life and settled in Llandaff.
She has been here a decade. “My life is here,” she says. The irony of her PhD subject has not escaped her. “I wrote a PhD on migration – now I am living it. It’s exactly what I am living through.”
Edel was supporting herself with care work, but it was more than a job – it was a passion, bringing smiles to faces all over the Valleys. Citizens UK celebrated her as a “Living Wage legend”, transforming pay for Welsh care workers. And she is one of more than 100 people who have taken part in the Mirror’s People Move Instagram project, highlighting people’s extraordinary journeys to the UK.
Then, in January this year, Edel’s student visa expired while she was finishing corrections to her PhD. She applied for further leave to remain but was refused, so she tried to get a Certificate of Sponsorship licence through her employer – but they did not have the right accreditation, meaning she found herself unemployed.
Edel applied to a new care work employer, but again the COS was not granted.
When she tried to appeal to the Home Office, she says she was told they could find no record of her applications.
Edel cannot afford legal fees because she is no longer able to work. So now she is in limbo, trapped at home and reliant on food parcels – fearing the immigration van. She has shown me a letter from the Home Office that says she is “liable to be detained”.
Edel is not an asylum seeker – though she fully respects those who are – but a migrant worker and overseas student caught up in what she sees as an increasingly aggressive and intimidating landscape for people like her.
“This is what happens under hostile immigration policies,” she says. “People with good careers become nobodies.
“I used to help support asylum seekers in our community, many of whom were my friends. Now, I have become one of them. Now they come to me with help. They are mentoring me.
“I don’t want to tell people at home in Kenya what is happening because they are sick – and they rely on me. They message me and send me bills, saying I have run out of medicine.
“I can’t do anything to help them, so I have had to stop replying to their messages and reject their calls. Perhaps they think I am dead or have disowned them.”
While Edel remains in fear of being sent to a detention centre, a few months ago something happened that gave her back her faith in humanity – just as she had run out of food and was heading into severe rent arrears.
“There was a very loud knocking on the door,” Edel says. “I thought, ‘This is it, they have come for me’. In fact, it was my neighbour Sian, a Welsh woman. She brought me two bags of shopping. It was incredible – oranges, fruit, sardines, vegetables, porridge oats, definitely my ‘five a day’. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘How much do I owe you?’ Sian said, ‘Don’t be silly, I didn’t pay for most of this food, it would have gone to waste’.
“I don’t really believe her, I am sure she is adding food in. Lots of it is from Waitrose – I have never been so posh!”
The act of her kind neighbour dropping food round has given campaigner Edel the strength to carry on with battling her visa nightmare – contacting more than 100 solicitors to ask for help.
“We don’t talk very much because, like a lot of British people, she is the kind of person who is embarrassed if you say thank you to them,” she says. “But I think Sian is one of the uncelebrated British people – the ones we don’t hear about. They are there up and down the country, not just in Wales.
“It’s not just my neighbour, there are a million amazing people in Britain. I have seen in my care work the way people change as they get to know migrant carers. In most of the homes I’ve worked the majority of care workers are migrants, and when people see what good care we take of their loved ones they are shocked, and they change their views.” The Home Office has been contacted for comment. This is the second summer in which people have taken to the streets over small boat crossings and asylum hotels, with angry, sometimes, violent protests against migrants.
As the rhetoric of the political parties intensifies, her fear grows. “When you are full of hatred you need to hate someone,” Edel says.
“You start with the person who is most vulnerable – but then, when there is nobody else left to hate, you will hate yourself.
“You cannot grow a society that is hating on others. Hatred will eat you up. You will eat yourself up. We have to start listening to each other.”