‘I’m a gay refugee about to start working – I wouldn’t have this life in Rwanda’ | 72CTMQY | 2024-05-12 11:08:01
'I'm a gay refugee about to start working – I wouldn't have this life in Rwanda' | 72CTMQY | 2024-05-12 11:08:01
Jared Vallejo's neighbours in Guatemala were anything but perfect. Assassins, extortionists, drug lords and gangsters, to name a few of them.
He had lived in Boca del Monte, a village about 15 miles from the Colombian border, his entire life.
Living in the same block as Jared's family were members of Mara Salvatruchas, known as MS-13, a violent criminal gang that has for decades torn through Central America.
'There's a strange rule that, when you live next to one of those people, they don't mess with you,' Jared, now 36 and living in Birkenhead, Merseyside, tells Metro.co.uk. 'They mess with everyone else.'
Jared, however, seemed to be the exception: 'I needed to walk in front of them every single day to get to school and initially it was just insults but as we grew up, they started to get more violent and they would throw rocks at me.
'When they realised I was in a relationship, they threatened to "remove the homosexuality" out of me with bullets.
'In 2019, they told me to leave as I was going to "infect kids with homosexuality". The second time they said this, they attacked me. They said they would kill me.'
Fearing his parents would confront them and end up killed, Jared kept his sexuality – and the violence he faced daily – a secret.
'I was going to be killed for being gay. One night in 2021, I was in my room and I heard my mum screaming on the streets. Me and my brother came out and saw a group of men kicking my father's body – he was unconscious,' he recalls.
'The only thing I could do was throw myself between them and cover him. I was trying to see if he was alive, he was bleeding and, at the same time, I could hear my mum screaming. She was being attacked a few metres away.
'They were laughing. Every time I remember that night, I know it was my fault and I feel guilty because I couldn't do anything.'
The gang backed off, granting the family 'peace'. Yet the members' ties to the police kept them out of jail, Jared says, something all too common as poorly paid Guatemalan officers have two options: corruption or death.
At the time, Jared worked a customer service job for a North American software company. A chance encounter with a shareholder would be his ticket out of the life-or-death situation – literally, a plane ticket.
'She wanted me to live in the US and that she would help me make a life there. But the US denied me a visa because of my poor background and country,' says Jared.
With a good grasp of English, Jared looked to the UK.
After two days of leap-frogging flights, he landed in Manchester in October 2021 and became one of 415 people to claim asylum on the basis of sexual orientation that year, as official figures show.
'I know it sounds like a quote from a movie, but everything was going very fast and I was just trying to catch up,' he explains. 'When I was on that plane to the UK, all I could think about were the things I was leaving behind and I didn't know what was about to happen.'
Jared saw what little money he had brought with him gobbled up by hostel bills, forcing him to sleep on the streets for days. He couch-surfed using Grindr, a queer dating app, only for a man to kick him out in the middle of the night after discovering he was applying for asylum.
'Then I found this amazing guy from Poland who allowed me to stay with him. He would cook for me every day – he was so kind,' he adds.
Applying for asylum was a challenge for Jared. Only after he found Rainbow Migration, a charity that supports LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, did he know the right number to call.
On the phone with the Home Office's asylum intake unit, Jared claims the response he got was anything but welcoming.
"'Why do you keep coming to this country?"' the staffer allegedly said. '"The economy in this country, the inflation is so bad we couldn't we cannot give you jobs here in this country. Why do you keep coming?"
'How is it that the person supposed to help me is telling me I shouldn't have come here? I don't want to paint the Home Office as a villain, because they're not.
'There are really awful people working for them – and they're really good people working for them.'
A Home Office spokesperson said in a statement to Metro.co.uk: 'We expect the highest standards from staff who register asylum claims.
'Whenever unacceptable behaviour is found, the matter will be fully and promptly investigated, and disciplinary action taken.'
Throughout this all, every phone call with his mother ended the same way. Tears – and a lot of them – from both sides of the receiver: 'The first Christmas I spent in this country alone, I cried.'
Asylum seekers are not permitted to work and can only do so under certain conditions, according to the Home Office, and the only social welfare they are entitled to amounts to roughly £5.66 per day.
So in December last year when Jared was granted refugee status, getting a work permit was top of his to-do list.
'As an asylum seeker, you accept going through the process your immigration status is not "asylum seeker" it's "detained", as if you committed a crime,' he says.
Months of waiting for a work permit and hundreds of job applications later, Jared will soon start working as a customer service representative for Nationwide in a few weeks.
'Finding a job was the last piece in finally being able to make a life in this country,' he says.
This is a life that Jared knows he would never have in Rwanda.
The Rwanda policy has a simple goal: allowing the government to put some asylum seekers on one-way flights to the central African country.
The legislation has become the government's flagship immigration policy, one critics call inhumane and unworkable, and was passed in April.
Boris Johnson proposed the idea in 2021 only months before Jared landed in the UK. Officials hope this will help 'stop the boats', referring to people crossing the English Channel by small, often unseaworthy boats considered an 'irregular' way to Britain.
In response to the Supreme Court ruling the plan unlawful, the government proposed the Safety of Rwanda Act that declares Rwanda safe in law and instructs judges and immigration officials to treat it as such.
Yet if the policy had been in effect when Jared was boarding his flight to Manchester all those years ago, he would have asked to get off.
'Not only would I have been sent to a place where I'm not familiar with the language or culture,' he says, 'but I know for a fact I wouldn't be safe.'
Homosexuality is legal in Rwanda, though the Home Office said in a since-archived document there was 'some evidence of discrimination and intolerance' towards LGBTQ+ people there.
Out of 196 countries, the LGBTQ+ rights monitoring website Equaldex ranks Rwanda at 138, pointing to 'deeply ingrained homophobic attitudes' as one reason for this.
In an equality impact assessment, the Home Office says an applicant's sexuality will be considered when deciding whether to relocate them. Caseworkers assess on individual merit.
Everyone considered for relocation will be screened and have access to legal advice, the department says, with no relocations organised if the applicant is at risk in Rwanda, according to a Home Office fact-sheet.
While their case is considered in Rwandan immigration officials, they will be provided accommodation, food, healthcare and amenities, the fact-sheet says.
The Home Office added to Metro.co.uk: 'Under the UK-Rwanda treaty Rwanda is obliged to provide safety to all those relocated without discrimination. Their constitution does not criminalise or discriminate against sexual orientation in law or policy.'
Leila Zadeh, the executive director of Rainbow Migration, says the charity has received an increasing number of calls from queer people worried they'll be next to board a flight to Rwanda.
'The latest heartless Rwanda Act is just another piece of legislation that will put the lives of LGBTQ+ people seeking safety here at even greater risk,' she says.
'It's a cruel and dystopian plan from this government, to forcibly send people seeking protection in the UK thousands of miles away to a place where they have no connection to and where their lives might be in danger.
'People need support to rebuild their lives in safety here, not punishment. Most of us welcome people who have fled unimaginable horrors but instead, this government is intent on sending them to danger.'
A 'safe route' in the UK means a journey approved by the government, such as visa routes or family reunions. Such routes, however, are scarce, Leila says.
</div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> With so few options, Jared says he doesn't blame people for crossing the 350-mile-long Channel known for its frigid waters.
'If you tell someone to go through the door because if you come through the window you have no right to anything inside the house, but then they go to the door and it's locked, what do you expect them to do?' Jared explains.
'Hearing about Rwanda makes you feel so vulnerable, so hopeless, it makes you feel no one considers you human enough to provide a home to.
'They make you feel like a problem, tossing you from country to country, a disposable thing.
'To make it that people that come here illegally are going to immediately sent off is unfair because if they came here illegally, more often than not, that means that these are the most vulnerable people who have fled the country.
'The poorest people suffer the most from this bill.'
Nevertheless, Rishi Sunak has said the first flights to Rwanda will take off in the summer.
Jared flew nearly 5,400 miles from Guatemala – away from his family and friends – to get to the UK, as so many others have done before.
No one dreaming of a life in Britain should find themselves flying 4,000 miles away from it to Rwanda, he says.
'What kind of life could I have had in Rwanda?' Jared adds. 'I couldn't.'
The Home Office has been approached for comment.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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