30 April 2018•Update: 30 April 2018
By Muhammad Mussa
LONDON
British Home Secretary Amber Rudd has resigned Sunday evening after failing to address her role in a recent immigration crisis known as the Windrush Scandal.
Rudd was facing mounting pressure from opposition lawmakers over her role in creating policies that led to long term Caribbean residents of the U.K. being denied NHS healthcare, work pensions and benefits with some being threatened with deportation.
Rudd was due to make a parliament statement to explain the differences between evidence she provided to the Home Affairs Select Committee last week and a recent memo leaked by the Guardian newspaper, which connected her to regional targets for the removal of migrants.
The leaked documents showed that Rudd was sent targets for the removal of migrants but she had insisted that she knew nothing of Home Office targets.
“I wasn’t aware of specific removal targets. I accept I should have been and I’m sorry that I wasn’t. I didn’t see the leaked document, although it was copied to my office as many documents are,” Rudd said in a statement on Twitter.
The Windrush Scandal became the point of focus after 12 heads of Caribbean states -- all members of the Commonwealth -- complained to Prime Minister Theresa May of the unjust treatment their citizens were receiving in the U.K.
May had since then apologized to the heads of states during the Commonwealth summit held earlier in April and promised to issue them citizenship with no added costs.
The Windrush Generation were a group of migrants from the Caribbean who were invited by the British government at the end of the Second World War to settle in the U.K. and help in its reconstruction.
The Prime Minister, having spoken to Rudd Sunday evening, accepted the home secretary’s resignation.
Rudd had pledged a solution of the issue after the issue was raised in the parliament.
Approximately 500,000 people who were born in a Commonwealth country and arrived before 1971 live in the U.K.
Most of the Jamaican and some other Caribbean residents lack their own documents as they had arrived in the U.K. on their parents’ passports as children.
