Dozens of Jamaican nationals have been taken off a removal flight in the days and hours before it was due to set off, raising renewed questions around the legality and efficacy of the Home Office’s deportation policy.

Campaigners say just four deportees were on board the charter plane, which left Birmingham Airport in the early hours of Tuesday morning and is said to have had capacity to seat 350 people. Around 50 people were originally due to fly.

Hours before the flight, activists calling themselves Stop The Plane locked themselves to metal pipes outside Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatw

The Home Office removed an unknown number of deportees from the flight list due to the fact that there has been a Covid outbreak at Colnbrook, an immigration removal centre near Heathrow, where they were being held.

At least five also had their removal deferred because they have been identified as potential victims of trafficking, with indicators that they have been groomed by county lines gangs and that this played a role in crimes they have committed.

Among those taken off the flight list include a man, 23, who has lived in the UK since he was three-months-old and another, 29, who has been in the country since he was a year old. Neither have any memory of Jamaica and both have been identified as potential county lines victims.

The Home Office also took a man with HIV off the flight list. The department was threatened with legal action over the failure to provide him with life-saving treatment in the detention centre, as reported by The Independent.

A judge halted the removal of another detainee on Tuesday, raising concerns about the fact that people who have been in the UK since they were under 12 were being deported, despite the fact the Home Office appeared to have a policy of not removing these people last year.

Judge Blundell said: “The conclusion at ‘ministerial level’ less than 12 months ago was that there were very compelling circumstances such that the Applicant could not be deported; there have been no relevant factual or legal developments in the last 12 months that could account for a departure from the previous position.”

Last week, it emerged that the Home Office was planning to deport non-criminals to Jamaica for the first time since the Windrush scandal broke, in what was described as an “affront to the Windrush generation”.

Among them was a 20-year-old woman with no criminal convictions who has been in the country since she was 13 and has no relatives in Jamaica. She was due to be deported with her mother, 56, who also has no convictions. Both were taken off the flight list within hours of The Independent publishing an article about the situation

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