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“Just as I arrived there was another passerby who just happened to be walking up the street, saw what was going on and sat down,” he says. “Then someone with a bike who was cycling past came and sat, and the next thing I knew there were 200 people.” Jamie says that watching the crowd grow to roughly a thousand people on the Pollokshields street at times felt “like an out-of-body experience”, but was ultimately unsurprising. After all, he adds, “What did they expect from the city of the Glasgow Girls?”
Roza Salih, whose voice often rang out on megaphones across the crowd that day, is one of seven women who formed the Glasgow Girls as schoolgirls in 2005 protesting the detention of their friend Agnesa Murselaj and her family in a dawn raid after fleeing Kosovo for asylum in the UK five years prior. After successfully stopping the Murselaj family’s deportation, the group’s members have been fighting for asylum seeker and refugee rights in Glasgow ever since.
Glasgow protesters rejoice as men freed after immigration stand-off Hundreds surround van men are held in chanting ‘these are our neighbours, let them go’
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Police in Glasgow have released two men detained by UK Immigration Enforcement in a dawn-raid following a standoff with protesters who refused to let the Immigration van leave. Video: Henry Rayner/Reuters
One of two men released from the back of an immigration enforcement van thanks protesters in Glasgow on Thursday. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire
Campaigners have hailed a victory for Glaswegian solidarity and told the UK home office “you messed with the wrong city” as two men detained by UK Immigration Enforcement were released back into their community after a day of protest.