Every few months I hear a story about someone who the Home Office is about to deport despite the fact that they are making or have made a huge contribution to society. Sometimes the story emerges of a person I know, and sometimes someone else. However almost every time I am left wanting to hold our Home Office to account for potentially destroying communities through a hardline approach to rules that seem at need a great deal of flexibility.  A few days ago a friend of mine Dani Ahrens wrote this amazing blog about her own life as an immigrant and compared it to the life of Albert Thompson who after 44 years living in the UK, paying taxes and contributing to our society, is being told that his cancer treatment will cost him thousands of pounds, a sum that another person whose paperwork was handled in a different manner would be covered by our national health service. No doubt the rules being applied to Albert are those designed to stop health tourism. After 44 years no one would describe Albert as a tourist to the UK. Then over the weekend the story emerged of a couple, currently staff members at Durham University with their 11 year old daughter who are all about to be deported for breaking a rule that on the face of it should be open to a flexible approach. The couple are Dr. Ernesto Schwartz-Marin and his wife Arely Cruz-Santiago who is a research postgraduate in Geography. Apparently they have a tier 2 visa and in the academic year 2014-2015 spent too many days in their home nation of Mexico. Now it appears there is a flexible element to the rule relating to the time spent abroad, which is that it can be waived if the people concerned are ‘attending to a national or international humanitarian or environmental crisis’. According to this petition I have just signed they were helping to establish a DNA database for families in Mexico whose family members had disappeared due to gang related and/or drug violence. Now apparently this does not fulfil the Home Office’s definition of a humanitarian crisis. I think the people in the Home Office need to be held to account for their grasp of how decisions impact society. They do after all have rules about deporting people who have broken laws and have been prosecuted. This is explained as a way of protecting our society. Surely the same logic should be applied to the lives of Albert and Ernesto. If they are making such a positive contribution to the community where they live, the need for flexibility even where pedantic rules have been broken or not followed when they first arrive or when they are spending time abroad must be taken into account. Deporting Ernesto and Arely and charging such a large sum to Albert makes no sense to people who they know and who learn from them. Indeed it doesn’t take long for people who don’t know them to see that this is a dreadful way of interpreting such situations. The big question is how do people like me and Dani and the thousands of others who are supporting all of these people get a chance to speak up demanding that the Home Office becomes more focused on the communities it is supposed to be protecting?