British Interior minister refuses to quit over immigrants’ treatment

LONDON: British interior minister Amber Rudd said she had no plans to resign after giving contradictory statements about meeting targets for deportations, deepening a scandal over Britain’s treatment of Caribbean immigrants.

For nearly two weeks, British ministers have been struggling to explain why some descendants of the so-called “Windrush generation”, invited to Britain to plug labour shortfalls between 1948 and 1971, had been labelled as illegal immigrants.

The Windrush scandal overshadowed the Commonwealth summit last week in London and has raised questions about Theresa May’s six-year stint as interior minister before she became prime minister in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.May apologised to the black community on Thursday in a letter to The Voice, Britain’s national Afro-Caribbean newspaper. “We have let you down and I am deeply sorry,” she said.

“But apologies alone are not good enough. We must urgently right this historic wrong. “Rudd said at a lunch with reporters in parliament that it had been “a difficult few weeks”, but she was committed to the Home Office.

She told lawmakers on Wednesday that Britain did not have targets for the removal of immigrants, but on Thursday was forced to clarify her words after leaked documents showed some targets did exist.

“I have never agreed that there should be specific removal targets and I would never support a policy that puts targets ahead of people,” Rudd told parliament in answer to an urgent request for a statement from the opposition Labour Party.“The immigration arm of the Home Office has been using local targets for internal performance management,” Rudd said.