Pregnant woman fearful as deportation splits family apart

BESIDE the door of room seven on the second floor of Dublin's Rotunda hospital 30-year-old South African Tanya Dube lies watched by two plainclothes female prison officers.

She is seven months pregnant, sick, miserable and separated from her family who will shortly be dispersed to different corners of the world.

Arrested on Tuesday morning at her home in Galway as part of the second phase of Operation Hyphen, Tanya was sent to Dublin’s Mountjoy prison pending deportation to South Africa.

On Wednesday, due to illness and complications with her pregnancy, she was transferred to the Rotunda hospital.

Meanwhile, her Nigerian husband, Basil, who was also arrested on Tuesday, is being detained in Clover Hill prison and is likely to be deported to the UK, his first point of entry to Europe.

Since the arrests, Tanya’s 14-year-old son, Mpendulo-Nkomo, has been in health board care. His application for asylum has not yet been considered. Meanwhile, no one knows what his future holds.

“That child is currently in the care of the health board, in one of the residential care homes, and will be until we are told otherwise,” said a spokesperson for the Western Health Board.

Tanya said she had not heard from her husband since they were arrested on Tuesday. “I am not allowed to speak to him. I am not allowed near a phone to talk. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t have anyone to help me. My son and my husband are the only people I have in my life,” she said.

“I’m not OK since I left Galway. They came to take me without any notification of deportation. They just came to take me with the police. I didn’t know anything,” said Tanya, who fled her home town of Soweto in South Africa after her parents disappeared and she began receiving death threats.

Although Tanya is due for deportation, consultants at the Rotunda have written a letter stating she is unfit to travel. “My doctor and social worker said I am not fit to travel. I’m in the hospital and they want to deport me,” she said, breaking into tears.

Rosanna Flynn of Residents Against Racism, who visited Tanya yesterday, said: “It’s hard not to be emotional and upset to see her how she was. It’s very difficult to look at a woman who is suffering the way Tanya is. Her health and that of her unborn child is being put in danger and her family is about to be split apart. I think it’s absolutely inhuman treatment, and to think that it would be so easy for the Government to take most of her trouble away.”

Asked what would happen to Mpendulo-Nkomo when his parents are deported, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice said they could not comment on individual cases.