The Glasgow Girls: The Schoolchildren Who Stopped a Deportation

The girls – Amal Azzudin, Emma Clifford, Jennifer McCarron, Toni Henderson, Ewelina Serbinska, Margaret McCarthy and Roza Salih – were fifteen and sixteen years old. Several were themselves from refugee or asylum-seeking families: Roza Salih had come from Iraqi Kurdistan, Amal Azzudin’s family from Somalia. They understood the asylum system from the inside in ways that most of their teachers and the journalists who later covered the campaign did not.

They started by contacting the local press. They wrote to their MP. They organised a petition. They made enough noise that Agnesa and her family were released from the detention centre where they had been held before removal.

The dawn raid on the Mirs was not an isolated incident. The Home Office’s National Asylum Support Service had been dispersing asylum seekers to Glasgow since 2000, making the city one of the largest dispersal locations outside London. Glasgow took around 5,000 asylum seekers in the programme’s early years. By 2005 the system of dawn raids – removals conducted before daylight, partly to avoid public attention – had become established practice, and Glasgow communities had been watching it happen for several years.

The Glasgow Girls made the practice visible. Their campaign coincided with growing pressure from the Scottish Executive – Scotland had devolved government but immigration remained reserved to Westminster – which found the spectacle of schoolchildren being dragged from their beds politically uncomfortable. The girls gave interviews, attended parliament, and refused to be managed or patronised in the way that official responses to youth activism generally attempt.

In 2005, following sustained pressure from the campaign and from MSPs including Pauline McNeill, the Scottish Executive and the Home Office reached an agreement that asylum-seeking children in Scotland would not be removed from school during term time. Dawn raids on families with school-age children became effectively suspended in Scotland – a policy difference from the rest of the UK that had no precedent.

It was not a complete solution. Adults without children could still be removed. Families could still be held in immigration detention at Dungavel House in South Lanarkshire, a detention centre that became a focus of its own protests. But the specific protection for school-age children was real, and it had been won by teenagers with no resources beyond persistence and each other.

Roza Salih later stood as a candidate for the Scottish Green Party in the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections. The Glasgow Girls were the subject of a BBC Scotland musical drama in 2014, and their story has been taught in Scottish schools as a case study in civic activism. Agnesa Murselaj, whose removal in that April 2005 dawn raid started everything, was eventually granted indefinite leave to remain.

Drumchapel is one of Glasgow’s peripheral estates, built in the 1950s as overspill housing and carrying the full weight of deindustrialisation’s consequences in the decades that followed. That the campaign started there, with teenagers whose own families had come through the asylum system, tells you something about where solidarity actually comes from.