UK's busiest immigration enforcement team seeing rise in arrests

A QUEUE of customers are turned away at Red Hot Goodies Chinese takeaway in Blackwood as frantic shouting in Mandarin is heard behind the curtain which separates the front desk from the kitchen that leads to a modest, cramped apartment upstairs.

- JONATHON HILL

Five immigration officers donned in stab vests which read 'Immigration Enforcement' quickly locate each person in the building before one of them, who was serving customers seconds before, is arrested and the takeaway is closed for the night.

The suspected illegal worker, a woman from China who only gives her first name and refutes suggestions she is working at the takeaway despite being seen working behind the till, is not the person the officers are looking for but she is arrested anyway.

It transpires the young woman, a former marketing student who arrived in the town in Caerphilly borough two months ago, reached the UK legally via a skilled worker visa but in reality she is carrying out what is deemed unskilled work by helping out behind the till at the takeaway.

Her stay is therefore illegal and she is informed she will have to leave the UK as soon as possible.

She found the family who run the unremarkable takeaway in a quiet residential street on the internet, the young male owner tells officer Richard Johnson, who leads the raids.

He says he has never paid her before he shows the officers the company's bank statements, which show the woman is paying him £280 a month to live in the flat upstairs with the family.

Trying to block out the owner's mother, who continues to shout over the officers in Mandarin, they establish she's effectively being given reduced rent in exchange for her labour.

The owner claims he knows nothing about the woman other than her name, age, and that her passport is in date.

Richard asks: "The only reason she came here was to help you in this shop?"

The owner replies: "I think she was homeless and had nowhere to go."

Richard asks: "Why did you think she was homeless?"

"I just took a guess," he replies.