Glossy promotional document handed out to asylum seekers detained under Rishi Sunak’s deportation policy

Asylum seekers who have been detained under Rishi Sunak’s deportation policy are being handed a colourful promotional document entitled “I’m being relocated to Rwanda. What does it mean to me?”.

The news comes as the government faces a second legal challenge over the prime minister’s £500m policy and it emerged that dozens of asylum seekers are being forcibly taken to detention centres.

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The policy has always been a sordid theatre of cruelty, and it is unravelling in ways that were entirely predictable

Handcuffed and surrounded, faces pixelated for the video as if they were dangerous criminals, one by one they were bundled into vans. Doors slammed. Keys clicked in locks. The crude political message from this disturbing eve of election video , showing men and women being rounded up for deportation to Rwanda, couldn’t have been clearer – despite Whitehall rules precluding partisan activities so close to polling day.

But hey, what’s a row over election purdah, given the amount of souls sold to get this far? All that matters to this government now is getting someone on a plane to Kigali in front of the TV cameras, a tunnel vision that has so far spectacularly failed to woo back lost voters, while costing the country years of parliamentary and legal wrangling, roughly half a billion pounds, and now yet another rift with friends and allies.

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Bishop of Dover praised people who stopped removal of men from Margate to Bibby Stockholm barge

A prominent Church of England bishop has praised the protesters who successfully disrupted the Home Office’s attempts to move asylum seekers to the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset.

Using words which could put her in conflict with Downing Street, the Right Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the former chaplain to the late Queen and the House of Commons, thanked the local people who had blocked buses and said: “Our Lord showed compassion for the most vulnerable.”

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Dozens of demonstrators in Peckham surround coach before it can take people to barge in Dorset

A coach sent to collect asylum seekers and take them to the Bibby Stockholm barge has been surrounded by protesters in south London.

Dozens of demonstrators in Peckham have blocked a coach before it was able to pick up passengers by surrounding it on all sides.

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Since Rishi Sunak obviously has nothing left to do but campaign, he should call a general election

In the weeks immediately preceding an election, government resources are not meant to be deployed for party political campaigns. The convention – commonly called “purdah” but officially described as the “ pre-election period of sensitivity ” – is not an enforceable prohibition. It relies on deference to democratic protocol and an intuitive sense of what constitutes fair play in the electoral arena.

The Conservative party has abandoned those qualities. The period running up to Thursday’s local, mayoral and police commissioner elections across England have been punctuated with government announcements that look customised more for campaign purposes than practical administration. In the days before the polls open, the Home Office has boasted of successfully flying an asylum seeker to Rwanda, and released a video showing immigration enforcement officers raiding homes and putting people in secure vans ready for deportation.

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Guardian understands dozens of detentions have taken place across the UK this week, prompting demonstrations

• UK politics – latest updates

UK ministers have acknowledged for the first time that they are detaining asylum seekers to be removed to Rwanda, sparking demonstrations outside Home Office buildings.

Nationwide operations began this week to detain people, a statement said, with more activity due to be carried out over the next 11 weeks leading up to a one-way flight to east Africa.

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Sudanese man being held in Croydon after arriving for routine sign-in believed to be first potential deportation under new law

An asylum seeker who turned up for a routine Home Office appointment on Monday was detained and told that he was being sent to Rwanda, a charity has said.

In what is believed to be the first potential deportation case since Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill received royal assent, the Sudanese man was held in Croydon, south London, the charity Soas Detainee Support told the Guardian. The man told charity workers he had arrived to sign in but was informed that he would be deported to east Africa.

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Asylum seekers are our neighbours, not political pawns for failing politicians. If MPs cannot resist the Rwanda plan, activists will

Laws that are unjust will inevitably be broken. Here is a basic reading of our history, and indeed how numerous rights and freedoms were secured in the first place. Ruled as we are by a desperate man lacking a moral compass, our sinking government has brought forward plans to detain asylum seekers across the UK in preparation for their deportation to Rwanda. After both the European court of human rights and the supreme court declared the government’s scheme unlawful – not least because Paul Kagame’s authoritarian regime could plausibly deport them to the country from which they fled – the government railroaded through legislation, absurdly declaring Rwanda to be safe. Here is the very definition of a law to be disrespected: one drawn up to override the courts and thus the separation of powers, to turn a lie into a legal fact, in support of an unworkable and immoral scheme that imposes pain on the traumatised purely to bolster a prime minister’s imploding administration.

Civil disobedience will take many forms. Asylum seekers will simply avoid reporting to the authorities, disappearing from the system altogether: indeed, the Home Office reports it cannot locate more than six in 10 migrants identified for deportation. But a network of activists across the country is poised to take action. We have lived through a decade of protests , speaking to a growing willingness to take to the streets to defy authority. Social media plays a pivotal role, not least when it comes to migrants’ rights: Anti Raids Network, for example, uses X to promote calls by local groups to mobilise activists to stop deportation raids. One such callout in Solihull yesterday asked for help stopping a deportation van: “There are unmarked enforcement vans in the car park, and we think these people could be at risk of being taken to detention.”

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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Exclusive: Action by organisation supporting migrants argues new rules are discriminatory

An organisation that supports migrant workers has launched a legal challenge against the government’s new policy to bar care workers from bringing children and partners to the UK, warning that it is “tearing families apart”.

According to Migrants at Work, care workers have to choose between family life with their children and partners or getting a job as a health or social carer in the UK – they can no longer do both.

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