A Nottingham woman is set to be deported to El Salvador on Good Friday over what has been described as a “massively unfair” clerical error – despite her sister being granted a temporary reprieve. Karla Rodriguez Sanchez, 26, who has lived in Basford, Nottingham since 2024, was detained along with her sister Ivania last month, and is set to be deported to her birth country this coming Friday. Ivania’s deportation flight, originally scheduled for this Tuesday, has been temporarily halted.
Ivania and Karla have been supported by the Peoples Church in Nottingham, where the family are congregants and volunteers, with pastor Rob Gale calling their treatment “massively, massively unfair”.
Fleeing from death threats in El Salvador
“My family’s here, I don’t want to be without them,” Ivania, who remains in Home Office detention, told BBC East Midlands correspondent Jeremy Ball on Monday evening. “I feel so anxious and so depressed.”
The sisters arrived in the UK alongside their parents, Hektor and Reina, in 2019. The family say that they fled violent extortion attempts by criminal gangs in their home country, after Ivania was abducted and threatened by a man claiming to be a taxi driver.
“The extortion is the problem,” Hektor Rodriguez told the BBC, saying that gangsters had threatened to “kill all the family”. Since their arrival, they have filed several unsuccessful asylum claims. Following the rejection of their most recent claim in November, the family filed a joint appeal in January, with new legal representation and support from the church.
MP says deportation orders are “Unfair and dangerous”
Unfortunately, as the sisters are no longer considered dependents by the Home Office, they could not be included in this joint application. They were subsequently detained upon checking in at a Loughborough asylum detention centre on 20 March. Individual claims for both Karla and Ivania were filed that same day, but Gale says these were not processed by the Home Office until 7 April, at which point deportation proceedings had already begun.
“Nobody has explained to us up to this date what happened with that paperwork,” he said, adding that the claims were only retrieved following an intervention from Nadia Whittome, the MP for Nottingham East.
Whittome called the deportation proceedings “deeply unfair and extremely dangerous”, saying: “Two young women are threatened with deportation to a country with one of the highest femicide rates in the world, where gang members have made threats to their lives.
“It is only because of administrative errors and delays, including on the part of the Home Office, that they are separated from their family, in detention and may now be removed from the country.”
Treated like criminals despite following all the rules
Gale said: “They’re treating these people like criminals – but from what I can see, they’ve reported every month at the detention centre, they’ve not worked, they’ve followed all the rules. They’ve gone to college, they’ve worked on their English, and they’ve been incredible in their volunteer work with the church.”
He added that this was the first asylum case of this kind the Peoples Church had provided support for, saying: “All of us are feeling the pressure – there’s a lot of people praying and just trying to help.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is our longstanding policy not to comment on individual cases”.
