Green Party Council Votes to Refuse to Assist Home Office With Immigration Enforcement
Lewisham’s Green council has passed a motion to review all council contracts and data-sharing, with the explicit goal of refusing to assist immigration enforcement wherever legally possible.
The Greens call it an “anti-raids Sanctuary corridor.”
The Greens are trading the garden gloves and tofu for aiding and abetting people smugglers.
The Motion reads: “To join with the Green-led administration at Lambeth and other Councils, in developing an anti-raids Sanctuary corridor, working closely with migrant and law centres, anti-raids networks, faith and community groups, to improve our Sanctuary programmes, Council-wide practices and anti-raids resistance.”
Lewisham’s been a “Borough of Sanctuary” since 2021, but Home Office says the area has become a “major focus” for immigration enforcement, carried out 177 raids there last year.
The motion backs Lewisham Anti-Raids network, which it says helps illegal immigrants “understand their legal rights, with the aim to prevent and resist raids.”
Green Party Mayor Liam Shrivastava, who took Lewisham for the Greens in a landslide in May, has made “Borough of Sanctuary” the defining slogan of his mayoralty.
Cabinet Member for Communities, Sanctuary and Healing, Cllr Hau-Yu Tam and Green Party councillor Wellington Gill, who is from Dominican Republic and the council’s first “Migrant Champion” welcomed the move.
In a social media post, picked up by the X account “Subversive Force” which monitors “those undermining British society and its institutions,” they said that the move protects all residents form the “racist immigration raids that are happening in our borough.
Why is Lewisham is on authorities’ radar?
London accounts for roughly a third of the UK’s national trafficking referrals. Lewisham is kinda currently London’s murder capital.
Authorities often go after nail bars and hand car washes, the sector’s link to Vietnamese and Chinese trafficking networks is well established ie slaves!
Lewisham has a documented history as an origin point for county lines drug operations too.
A Lewisham gang leader was convicted in a landmark 2018 case for trafficking teenagers from south London into a county lines drug operation running into Portsmouth.
More recently, a Vietnamese Lewisham resident convicted in 2025 for conspiring to exploit migrants trafficked from Vietnam to work on cannabis farms.
This is an extreme way to get a steady supply of undocumented labour to fill the sustainable veg boxes, lads!