The life and limbo of a UK asylum seeker: one man’s harrowing 17-year wait for leave to remain

The outcome for those involved in military coups can be unpredictable at the best of times. In Ussu’s case, he was captured and tortured before making a bold escape. But after breaking out of the compound where he was jailed, and coming to Britain, a very different kind of fight lay ahead – one that lasted almost two decades. Ussu grew up in a small and unstable African country, a former Portuguese colony that was no stranger to attempted coups (the country is not being named to protect Ussu’s identity). A good student, he dreamed of going to university to train to become a doctor, but he was required to complete two years of military service first. Once he was in the army, though, his superiors refused to release him. Years passed and there was still no sign of an exit route. He became increasingly dismayed by the actions of his government. “A few of us army colleagues got involved in the coup to overthrow the government because we were surrounded by killings and corruption, and we wanted something better for the country,” he says. The coup failed, and imprisonment, beatings and torture with iron bars followed. “I was in prison for two months and 17 days, and have scars down the right side of my body,” he says. “People in countries like the UK don’t understand how refugees make decisions because our experiences are so different from theirs. A friend and I decided to risk escaping because we couldn’t face any more torture and beatings. We knew we might be killed but decided to take the risk. I didn’t have any good options.” It was 28 April 2008. Surviving the jail breakout was his last piece of good luck for a long time. A friend and I decided to escape because we couldn’t face any more torture. We knew we might be killed but took the risk He made contact with his family, who brought him food and medicine, obtained a false Portuguese passport for him, and helped him escape the country. He made it to the Gambia, with only the faintest notion about the concept of claiming asylum, but he knew that if he could get to Portugal, his country’s former colonisers, he was likely to find safety. But there were no flights to Portugal available. In a split-second decision that would change the course of his life, he bought a ticket to the UK instead. Had he managed to fly to Portugal, he would have been able to explain his predicament in Portuguese on arrival. He would have received guidance on claiming asylum, which he would almost certainly have been granted and been able to bring his wife and their two small children to join him. They might all have lived happily, and unremarkably, ever after. Instead, Ussu arrived in the UK bewildered and terrified, not speaking a word of English. He couldn’t understand any of the signs, but he was nodded through immigration with his false passport. He spent his last £120 on a black cab from the airport to the house of a friend in Canning Town, London. His friend had no helpful suggestions about how to claim asylum though. After a few weeks of sitting around aimlessly, he reverted to his original plan and got enough money together for a flight to Portugal. At Luton airport, disaster struck. Unable to read the signs on the departure board, he missed his flight. Then he was approached by immigration officials who questioned him, demanded to see his passport, suspected it was false, and arrested and handcuffed him. He was convicted for travelling on a false passport and sent to Peterborough prison. At this point, he had his first contact with a British lawyer and his first experience of the lottery of legal aid. He was allocated a duty criminal defence solicitor who, like him, knew nothing about the Geneva Conventions defence for refugees who have no choice but to travel on a false passport when they flee their country. The solicitor advised him to plead guilty and he obediently did as he was told. Only years later did he learn that he should have pleaded not guilty. This, too, might have changed everything. “When I finally found out I had been given the wrong legal advice, I wanted to try to get my conviction overturned but the law firm the solicitor was working for had gone out of business so I couldn’t access my records,” he says. Prison was a bad experience, although, he says: “Unlike in my country, this prison gave us a bed to sleep in instead of having to lie on the floor. We also had plenty of water to drink, which was not the case in my country. But I didn’t really understand why I was in prison. I kept saying to myself: ‘I’m not a criminal.’ In all the years I have been in the UK, I have never committed any crimes.” He was given the opportunity to claim asylum while he was in prison. He has held on to a faded copy of his Home Office asylum interview, where he was asked to give his account of why he fled his country. At one point, the record states: “Subject has asked to stop the interview as he is very upset. He wants to go back to his cell. He is not feeling good, he is very emotional and crying.” In early 2009, after serving his six-month sentence, he was moved to Colnbrook immigration detention centre, near Heathrow airport. The government hoped to deport him back to his country but his new immigration solicitor recognised that he was a victim of torture, and got him released. The Home Office moved him to asylum accommodation (which is offered on a no-choice basis) in Stockton-on-Tees, hundreds of miles away. He was released with just £40, two jumpers and a spare pair of trousers in his bag. Stockton was very different from his brief experience of London. “I could walk for miles in Stockton and not see a single Black person. I faced a lot of racism there. Some people shouted out things like: ‘Hey, monkey, what are you doing here? Go back to your country.’ At the time the far right was very active in the area.” His asylum claim was refused by the Home Office, at least in part because officials were not familiar with cases from his country. The Home Office terminated his accommodation in Stockton, so he made his way back to London. For a while he slept outside on an abandoned mattress on a church veranda. Police at a nearby station took pity on him and sometimes gave him leftover food. By this time he had learned about the existence of charities that help refugees and one of them found him a new solicitor to help him make a fresh asylum claim. This, too, was refused and an appeal was lodged. “In the immigration tribunal, the judge told me he thought I had a strong case but said that the case had been so badly prepared he could not grant my appeal. The barrister who represented me was the worst lawyer I had come across in my time in the UK.” Dejected and still homeless, he searched for another lawyer to take on his case. He was now living in a disused church in north London that had been converted into a shelter for refused asylum seekers, with mattresses laid out on the floor. If I was forced back to my country, I’d be killed. I had strong evidence of my torture, but the Home Office did not believe me “I knew that if I was forced back to my country, I would be killed because I had been involved in the military coup and had then escaped from my prison cell,” he says. “I had strong evidence of my torture from an expert doctor at the charity Freedom from Torture, but it seemed that whatever I said or did the Home Office did not believe me. I am not a liar. All I was doing was telling the truth.” Another charity found him a new lawyer. But this one struggled to find experts on his country who could corroborate his account of the coup, so only damaged his case more. With each failed attempt, Ussu became an increasingly unappealing proposition for poorly paid and overworked asylum lawyers to take on. He had no idea what to do. At one point he even considered trying to leave the UK, go home and get killed, as he felt there were no other options available. In 2013, he was offered what appeared to be a lifeline, but only prolonged his run of bad luck. He was given a secondhand bicycle by the charity the Bike Project. He could never afford public transport – as a refused asylum seeker, he received no support from the Home Office – but now he had the freedom to travel, and enrolled for a free carpentry course at a college in London, determined to try to gain some skills while in limbo. He was cycling along a main road one winter evening when a car driver failed to see him and hit him. He lay in the road screaming, his legs twisted in unimaginable positions. He was taken to hospital and given emergency surgery, but two days later was told he was being discharged because, as a refused asylum seeker, he was not entitled to any hospital treatment beyond emergency care. “So many bad things had happened to me in the UK,” he says, “but in all the years I have lived here, the way the staff in that hospital talked to me, and the way they told me they were going to discharge me on to the street, when I couldn’t walk, was in so much pain and could hardly get out of bed, hurt me so much.” A charity found yet another lawyer to challenge the decision to discharge him into homelessness, and the local council provided several weeks of “rehabilitation” in an elderly care home alongside people 30 or 40 years older than him. “I was told I would never walk properly again because one leg had become shorter than the other. But somehow, after many months of being in agony, I managed to get back on a bike. Cycling helped my recovery.” He began to help out at the Bike Project and, as an unpaid volunteer, became a stalwart of the project. His luck was beginning to change. Wilsons, a reputable firm of immigration solicitors, agreed to take on his case, even though they knew it required rebuilding from scratch. He was given new accommodation in Hertfordshire by the Home Office while his fresh claim was considered. He set off from there every morning, catching the 5.40am train to Deptford to open up the Bike Project workshop for 7am. He has helped hundreds if not thousands of asylum seekers to gain freedom and independence with reconditioned secondhand bikes. At 2.30pm every day he finished his work, travelled home and cooked himself the same identical meal – spaghetti with sardines – before going to bed and repeating the whole process the following day. This was at least the beginning of the end of Ussu’s gruelling journey: “It took Wilsons four years to fix the legal mess in my case,” he says. “The Home Office rejected it again but the lawyers appealed and I won. The Home Office appealed against my win to a higher court but the judge believed me and granted my appeal on the spot. It felt so good that that judge believed me.” I have a few simple words to say to the Home Office: you destroyed my life Sonia Lenegan, editor of the website Free Movement, says: “The degradation of the legal aid system over the past three decades, overseen by the government, has been a false economy that has certainly contributed to the current state of the asylum system. Many providers have exited the legal aid system entirely because of the lack of funding and excessive unpaid administrative burden. This shortage of lawyers has put an unsustainable amount of pressure on those who remain, meaning they must choose between doing less work on individual cases, or turning more people away.” The government announced in November 2024, and then again in July 2025, that legal aid fees for immigration and asylum work would be increased, yet more than three months on there is no sign of the desperately needed additional funds. Finally, this summer, after 17 years, one of the longest journeys through the system of any asylum seeker, Ussu received his eVisa confirming his leave to remain in the UK, and can now rebuild his life. “I’ve always been a family man but I haven’t seen my kids for so long,” he says. “They were so small when I left, but now they’re 20 and 24. I am trying to obtain a travel document so we can meet for a holiday for the first time in a safe third country.” He has maintained contact, though, speaking to them on WhatsApp every weekend. “I miss my kids so much and they miss me. Both have been to university and now want to do their master’s. I want to work as hard as I can to pay for their studies.” For now, he has a job as a kitchen porter in a restaurant in central London. He has passed tests to gain certification to work on construction sites and hopes to do that next. “While I was an asylum seeker, a charity helped me pass exams to do an access course to go to university. I gained a scholarship but the Home Office barred me from studying, saying as an asylum seeker I could not do this. “I have a few simple words to say to the Home Office: you destroyed my life,” he says. “How can they hold on to a person for 17 years who has done nothing wrong? Being an asylum seeker here is like living in an open prison. I’m still having flashbacks. I wake up in the morning and forget I’m no longer an asylum seeker, because I’m so used to living without status. I have been so tired and so broken on my journey to get leave to remain here. I came here to seek protection but until now I have been barred from work, study and travel. If I had not found a good firm of solicitors who were prepared to help me, I would still be barred from doing all those things.” Ussu is hoping that at last he will be able to progress and contribute to British society, working, paying taxes and volunteering. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of politics in his own country and the UK, and is an avid consumer of news and current affairs. “I thought this was a safe country but with people like Nigel Farage on the rise, I fear for the future. For now, I am just getting on with things. The Home Office tried to break me, but despite all the bad things that have happened to me, God put some really good people in my path who helped me fight. Their help was unconditional and they lifted me up. Despite everything, I’m still strong and I’m still here.”