If you are an EU citizen living in the UK, you only have until the end of this month, June 2021, to apply for (pre-) Settled status.
Settled is an independent charity providing free and trustworthy information, advice and support in different languages to EU citizens in the UK.
I know it is infuriating and humiliating to have to apply to stay legally in your own home. We came here in good faith, completely legally, to make this our home and contribute to the society here, in big and small ways.
But now we must apply to stay legally.
Please apply today.
Do not underestimate the gravity of the situation you could find yourself in without Settled status.
The Tory government’s hostile environment policy will include us. They will gleefully have us detained at borders and sent ‘back home’. Even if this has been our home for years or decades. Regardless of whether we have married UK citizens and/or have children who are UK citizens.
So please apply.
If you are a UK citizen please remind the EU citizens you know to apply. Even if you only know them from a casual chat at the gym, or they are your child’s teacher or they work at the local coffee shop. Please tell them. Even if you feel embarrassed to ask a ‘personal’ question like “do you have settled status?” Not everyone is aware that they need to apply, so you could be the difference between them being able to stay or not.
I have another ask for the UK citizens: please will you write your MP and ask them to give us physical proof of our status.
Currently that can only be accessed online. Imagine if you’re an EU citizen with settled status who is returning to the UK and at border control they can’t verify your status because the gov website is down.
They can’t verify your status. What will they do? Detain you? Send you back? Make you sleep in a van?
You may have heard about the big internet outage last week? Among other things, it affected the gov.uk website. Who’s to say that won’t happen again? Or a bunch of other reasons that the status can’t be accessed. The internet could be down, your new passport is not recognised in the system or your mobile was stolen so you can’t receive the code for the proof. And it’s not just for returning to the UK, we must prove our status when applying for jobs or show it to landlords. How the proof process works (or doesn’t work) at the moment.
I haven’t seen my parents since January 2020 and I really want to go to Denmark when it’s safe. But I am really anxious about what will happen when returning to the UK. Will I be able to prove my status? Or will I be handcuffed and marched through the airport? All my possessions taken from me? Should I write any phone numbers I might need on my arm in Sharpie?
I shouldn’t have to worry about this when retuning to MY HOME! None of us should.
We need physical proof.
The government are able to give everyone physical proof that they have been vaccinated against covid-19 but they can’t do the same for settled status?
100% concentrated bullshit.
Please write to your MP and ask them to give us physical proof.
PS If you are not familiar with this topic: if you want to know more about it, please do some searches on your search engine of choice before asking me to explain it all to you. It is emotionally taxing to have to live with this, as you can probably imagine. And every time I have to explain it to someone outside of the UK/EU/Brexit sphere it just reminds me how awful this is. :-( I wrote this post a couple of years ago and I feel the same.
PPS I am not a lawyer or a professional in this kind of thing, I am just someone caught up in the Brexshit mess. I can’t help you with your application or tell you when you will get your result.