The Home Office last week launched a nationwide operation to round up asylum seekers, leaving many fearful and confused

At 2.37pm on Thursday news that a man had “disappeared” rippled through London’s raid-resistance WhatsApp groups. The asylum seeker had walked into the Home Office immigration reporting centre in Hounslow, west London, for a routine appointment, as many people seeking refuge in Britain are required to do. His brother waited outside.

But the man did not come out. Ten minutes passed, then 20, then an hour, then three. The brother waiting outside went in, and came out with bad news: his sibling had been detained and told he faced being deported to Rwanda.

The UN says two camps for displaced people were hit near the city of Goma where thousands are seeking refuge from fighting in surrounding areas

Bomb attacks on two camps for displaced people in eastern Congo have killed at least 12 people, including children, according to the UN.

The bombs hit the camps in Lac Vert and Mugunga, near the city of Goma, the UN said in a statement, calling the attacks a “flagrant violation of human rights and international humanitarian law and may constitute a war crime”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Business secretary defends move, saying it ‘puts to bed myth that Rwanda is not a safe place’

Good morning. When the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill was in the House of Lords before Easter, a mysterious delay crept in. There was plenty of time to get it passed before the Easter recess, but the government held it back, without giving a good reason, and even when parliament returned, the government did not make passing the law a matter of urgency. It only cleared parliament, and got royal assent, last week.

And now it is fairly clear why. With the bill on the statute book, we are seeing a flurry of Rwanda-related activity from the government – which, by miraculous coincidence, seems to be turning up in the papers just days and hours before people in England vote in the local elections.

The Tories are so desperate to get any flight off to Rwanda before the local elections that they have now just paid someone to go.

British taxpayers aren’t just forking out £3,000 for a volunteer to board a plane, they are also paying Rwanda to provide him with free board and lodgings for the next five years. This extortionate pre-election gimmick is likely to be costing on average £2m per person.

This is cynical nonsense from a Conservative party that is about to take a drubbing at the local elections. Paying someone to go to Rwanda highlights just how much of a gimmick and farce their plan is.

This is somebody who has actually volunteered to go to Rwanda, which puts to bed this nonsensical myth that Rwanda was not a safe place.

It is. People go on holiday there. I know somebody who’s having a very lovely gap year there. We need to move past a lot of those myths, which are actually just disparaging about an African country.

There is no cost free option, that is the truth of it. It’s better this way than for him to be in the UK, either claiming benefits or being entitled to things that other people in this country can’t have, which be much more expensive for the taxpayer. But there is no free way to police our borders.

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.

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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