He arrived in the UK aged 12, but for the last 14 years Hall has been under threat of being sent back to Barbados – a country he doesn’t remember and where he has no surviving relatives.
All this time he has been kept on a deportation list, which means he cannot work, rent somewhere to live, receive benefits or do anything that would allow him to start rebuilding his life. Instead, he remains on the edge of destitution, reliant on the kindness of family and friends to survive.
In 2001 he was convicted of a serious crime – conspiracy to rob and having a firearm with intent; he spent eight years in prison. He had been planning with friends to hold up a security van taking money to a bank; he was carrying a toy gun, but there was also a real gun in the car. Police stopped them before a crime was committed.
The principle of rehabilitation suggests that Hall, having served his sentence, should then have been allowed to restart his life, as his co-defendants did.
Every fortnight Hall must attend an appointment at a Home Office reporting centre, carrying a document printed with his mugshot above a letter that warns him he is liable to be detained “pending a decision to deport you/because a decision has been made to deport you”. The journey there takes him the best part of two hours, and involves a few stops on the overground, a short bus ride, then six stops on the underground and another bus ride, followed by a queue at the reporting centre, a brief checking of documents and the reverse trip home. By now, he estimates that he has performed this time-consuming ritual more than 350 times.