Escaping from Iran to a Hotel in Hounslow
Newsha tells of the experience of being a refugee in limbo
Refugee Newsha has found sanctuary in a local Church. Picture: Facundo Arrizabalaga/MyLondon
December 29, 2023
It has been over a month since Newsha left her temporary home after finally being granted leave to remain in the UK. Her eyes light up as she recalls the community she found in the strange nether zone of her asylum hotel, a place she spent two years existing in near-suspended animation.
For the 26-year-old, the experience was something akin to lockdown. She couldn’t work, was unable to socialise properly, and was surrounded on all sides by what many have characterised as a ‘hostile environment’ towards refugees.
Her story is one of hardship and of bravery both on her part and the part of her parents. Newsha fled her homeland of Iran after threats of extreme violence were made against her, prompted by her conversion to Christianity.
“I fled my country because of religious persecution,” Newsha explains from the comfort of a Feltham church sofa. “There are many things that are forbidden in my country, so I did what was forbidden and I had to escape.”
Iran has seen increasingly repressive actions by the government in recent years, particularly after riots to protest the death of Mahsa Amini who died in police custody. After serious threats to Newsha’s life, her father, desperate to get his daughter to safety, found a smuggler willing to get her out of Iran.
It is a decision that cost the family dearly, not only having to part with their daughter but Newsha says her mother handed over her entire pension to pay for it. “She still won’t tell me exactly how much, she doesn’t want me to feel guilty,” Newsha said. She added, though, that she knows the money was enough to buy a house outright in Iran.
Flying directly to the UK from Iran, the simpler, safer and much cheaper option, was unavailable as Newsha explains that the government posts officers at airports to catch people fleeing. Instead, the then 24-year-old took the long and disorientating journey to reach safety, which started in the back of a truck heading for the Turkish border and ended in a church in Hounslow.
She admits that during the two weeks it took her to reach the UK she had no idea where she might end up. “I didn’t know that I was going to be smuggled here. I didn’t know I would be in the UK. The smuggler just promised to get me to a safe country.
“They also don’t know what kind of passport they are going to get so they just get you out of the country where your life is endangered and then what passport they get they just work with that.”
Frightened and alone Newsha did what the smuggler told her to. She waited in the toilet of Heathrow Airport for two hours, changed her clothes and turned herself in to the border services to claim asylum. “I don’t know, either it was the effect of shock or I couldn’t process what was happening, but I think I was walking about 30 minutes and I couldn’t find the passport controller.
“I walked and eventually found the passport controller and there was a lady standing at the front. I just pulled all of my guts in and said ‘no passport’ and the lady was so relaxed, I mean I was dying out of stress and she was so relaxed that I thought she didn’t hear.”
Newsha ended up in Heathrow’s asylum processing area where she was interrogated by Home Office officials about who she was and where she came from. It was a struggle to get through for the young, frightened woman, even though she speaks very good English due to teaching it in Iran.
When an interpreter was called to help, Newsha said that the impact of her journey and the circumstances that caused it hit her like a ton of bricks. While trying to answer questions through an interpreter Newsha says she froze up.
“Honestly, in that moment I even forgot my mother tongue, I couldn’t talk. I had this ball splitting my throat and I just said ‘No passport’. I just looked at [the interrogator] like a lamb that knows it’s going to be slaughtered.
“After he saw that I really wasn’t in a good condition. He just said ‘ok, what’s your name?’ and because I couldn’t say it, he just put a piece of paper and I wrote down my name and he said ‘Newsha’ and after almost two weeks, somebody calling your name was a really emotional thing and I just burst out into tears because for two weeks nobody called my name.”
She was given a piece of paper with her details on it before being interrogated further. It was at this point that Newsha would witness the first sting of harsh, unsympathetic language which left its mark on her.
After the second, longer, and more thorough investigation of her details Newsha says she heard something that has stayed with her. “When [the investigator] wanted to hand me over to the custody he said ‘We only need to do this and we can get rid of her’, I could [barely] stand so it really hit me hard. It was really cruel [to hear] for someone who has just escaped from a country, why would you say that?”
However, there were acts of kindness. Once she was in custody Newsha says she found people a lot softer. “The custody people were really nice, they could see that I was in shock, so they just sat me down. He came in and said ‘Do you need me to call someone?’ and as soon as I heard the word call I just started crying and I couldn’t breathe and later I found out that was my first panic attack ever.
“I was like ‘my mum, my mum, my mum’. I think he called her on his own phone which must have cost a fortune.”
After speaking to her parents, Newsha spent a night in Heathrow, before being moved on and eventually ending up in an asylum hotel in Hounslow around Christmas time 2021. “I was told ‘you can volunteer and study as much as you want, but you can’t work’.”
In terms of her living quarters, Newsha says she has no complaints. “They got me a really nice room for a single person. I didn’t need to share it with anyone which was nice. I mean it’s not a 5-star hotel but it was clean and nice.
“As the journey starts and you struggle with depression and anxiety and more panic attacks you are just tired of being in a hotel room. But eventually, you start to look at it like a home.
“I think it’s good that the Home Office puts people in hotels in the beginning, but I hope it wouldn’t take two years because it is really hard to get detached from the hotel and the people there. It’s good in the beginning because you are shocked, you don’t have the capacity to do anything, so putting someone in a house and telling them they need to pay bills I think that would be really stressful. The food was horrible though.”
She said that in the beginning, it was frozen food which they used to put in the microwave and “in the middle you could see it was frozen and bad quality”. She added: “It was very spicy because they thought because we are from the Middle East that we eat spicy food. It was bad.”
Newsha says that after a year the poor quality food caused people to suffer from stomach ulcers and babies who struggled with the spicy meals began suffering from malnutrition. She said, “Some people got really bad medical conditions [from the food] and went to the GP and then I think the council and Home Office worked together to get better food. They eventually changed the food to be better quality, better variety, vegetables.”
Apart from the food, Newsha says that having worked as a teacher in Iran from 8am to 8pm, her inability to work hit her hard. Instead, in the UK, she did the exact thing, but voluntarily, teaching English and interpreting but without being able to get paid. “I got good references, but I look at and I go ‘two years of my life, I didn’t work for two years’.”
Asylum seekers are given £8 a week allowance, which was not enough to even cover Newsha’s bus fare to and from college. Although Newsha could cope with the hotel conditions she said the suspense of not knowing if she was going to be approved to remain was like “torture”.
It’s been just over a month since she was approved to remain in the UK, and she has managed to find a teaching post in Hounslow starting in the New Year. However, she still doesn’t have a home. Like many who get their confirmed refugee status, Newsha was unable to find somewhere of her own to live before the 7-day ‘grace period’ given to newly confirmed refugees before they are evicted from their hotel rooms.
“After two years, you get people approved to get kicked out of the hotel with 7 days notice and when they go to a landlord they go ‘oh ok, where is your employment letter? where is your deposit? where is your guarantor?’ [the Home Office] didn’t let me work for two years, how am I supposed to get the employment letter and the deposit?”
Local authorities, such as Hounslow Council, which often acts as a housing safety net for homeless refugees have also not been able to provide Newsha with anything. Newsha explains that she hasn’t been deemed a priority for a house “because I’m under 35 and I’m childless”.
Luckily, she has found a home within the local Christian community, with someone from her local church who is currently letting her stay with them. Newsha is doing her best to build a life away from her home and her family, although her time in the Home Office hotel has left her with a lot to catch up on.
“Making me wait for two years. Making me write my stories with a pen that had no ink. In these two years, my life was on pause. So even if I can go to Turkey or another country and see my parents, it’s been postponed for two years.”
The Home Office has been contacted for comment.
Rory Bennett - Local Democracy Reporter