Emunah Baht-Gavriel left Trinidad and Tobago in 1970. She was 21 years old and had dreams of becoming a qualified nurse in the UK. Today, she is a victim of the Windrush scandal, and spent 20 years in dispute with the Home Office, fighting to get what she deserves.
Her problems with the Home Office began in 2004. She had started a new job teaching English as a Second Language at Bromley College in London when her Trinidadian passport was stolen from her car.
“I was taking it to the HR department to verify my status,” she explains. She immediately applied for a new one, and after a three year wait, which she generously attributes to “administrative issues”, it arrived in 2007.
But something was missing: it didn’t bear the stamp granting ‘indefinite leave to remain’ that her old one had.