Arjeta Fjolla, who was trafficked by a drugs gang to run a UK cannabis farm, now faces deportation – despite being a survivor of modern slavery
It’s almost six years since Arjeta Fjolla left Albania, in search of a better life. After being promised a work visa, she’d bought a flight to the UK. Over the following few weeks, promises failed to materialise, and then she was offered a job and a place to stay in Coventry.
“It was a normal terraced British house, neighbours each side,” Arjeta, 47, says. “They told me a flatmate would be coming to share the bills and we would work together.”
Two weeks later, her bosses arrived not with a flatmate but a stack of boxes. “There were lamps and fans and everything you need for growing plants indoors,” Arjeta remembers. “I said, ‘what is this?’ “They said, if you do not do what we are telling you, you will die. They knew where I lived, everything. They said, ‘We will kill you, and all your family back home’.”
Arjeta had been trafficked by a drugs gang to run a hidden cannabis farm in the upstairs bedrooms and loft. She says she had no option but to comply, and was held prisoner in the house. “I couldn’t do anything else,” she says. “I was completely alone. Sometimes they left me without food and I would go to the shop very scared. They said if I talk to anyone, any neighbours, they will kill me. If I say anything to anybody, the same threats.”
After about a year, she was terrified to hear the door coming in and relieved to see police breaking into the flat. “Thank God,” she says. “They took me out. They saved my life.” Arjeta was taken to a local police station, interviewed and sent to a safe house where she was interviewed under the ‘National Referral Mechanism’ which recognises victims of modern slavery.
The police and interviewers believed Arjeta. She was never arrested, and always treated as a survivor of trafficking gangs. “All I have ever wanted is to pay back this biggest favour someone can do for you – saving my life,” she says. She was moved to Liverpool for her safety, where she adopted Everton football club, as a fellow ‘blue’ – her team back home, KF Tirana, play in blue and white stripes – and has been volunteering as a way of paying back the country that saved her life.
Since she has been trapped in the UK, both her parents have died, but she was too frightened of the gangs, and continuing death threats, to visit or attend their funerals.
Yet six years on, until Thursday, Arjeta was one of 84 women being detained at Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre (IRC), near Consett in Co Durham, the UK’s only immigration detention centre exclusively for women. She was due to be deported to Albania yesterday, but her solicitors from the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit (GMIAU) won her an eleventh-hour extension until December 12 for her claim to be reconsidered.
When we spoke, we didn’t yet know the extension had been granted. “I had better kill myself than go to Albania,” she told me from inside detention. “That would be better than to live in fear, because I know they will find me. The border police will tell the gangs. I only have my brother left and if I go to him, he will be in danger.”
She said being detained had directly triggered terrifying memories of being held captive in Coventry, which had left her suicidal. “I’d better kill myself,” she said. Developed from the site of the former Medomsley Detention Centre – a borstal now infamous for the systematic abuse of young boys during the 60s and 70s – the detention centre has been hugely controversial since day one.
In 2021, Medomsley survivor David ‘Alan’ Brown, who was violently abused there, told me, “there was something sick about the whole place.” Survivors repeatedly called for it to be torn down. A few days ago, a demonstration organised by The No to Hassockfield Campaign, These Walls Must Fall and Right to Remain, brought hundreds of people to protest the detention of traumatised women.
One speaker told the crowd: “The moment you step in there, you are called by a number. You don’t have a name. When you go in there, you come out your life will never, ever be the same. Even when you have your papers, you will still be traumatised. You cannot live in a house with a bunch of keys because the sound of keys will remind you of that detention. That is what we are fighting against.”
Demonstrators chanted “set her free” as Arjeta spoke from inside the detention centre to the crowd by speaker phone. Her solicitor Cecilia Correale says the Home Office accepts that Arjeta was a victim of trafficking and modern slavery. “I feel like I have been treated like a criminal, even though the men who trafficked me were the criminals,” Arjeta told me. “I’m not a criminal – I’m a victim of modern slavery and trafficking. Although there are some kind staff at Derwentside, it is really a prison. There is barbed wire and high walls. You cannot leave.”
Inside the high metal fences, Derwentside is full of stories like Arjeta’s. “Arjeta is a survivor of human trafficking and modern slavery,” GMIAU’s Nicola Burgess, says. “She was held captive and subjected to control through threats of violence against her and her family. Her ordeal only ended when she was rescued by the police.
“Arjeta has provided clear and credible evidence demonstrating that she would be at serious risk of harm if returned to Albania, both from those who previously held her against her will and from the risk of being re-trafficked. Recently obtained expert evidence supports the plausibility of her account and confirms that her life would be in danger if she were forced to return. Arjeta’s recent period of detention has severely impacted her recovery and re-traumatised her.”
A spokeswoman for the Home Office said: “It is our longstanding policy not to comment on individual cases.” After we contacted the Home Office yesterday, her solicitors told us Arjeta was being released home to Liverpool while her claim is being assessed.
“I love being in Liverpool,” she said. “The people are great people, very friendly. I lost my family, so making a new family has been very important. I am a volunteer at 4Wings and I never missed a day until now. Helping other women has been my motivation for going on. I don’t think I will survive again in that place.”