LONDON, (Reuters) – Britain’s interior minister has resigned after Prime Minister Theresa May’s government faced criticism for its treatment of some long-term Caribbean residents who were wrongly labelled illegal immigrants, a government official said.
A spokesman for May was not immediately available for comment but a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed a BBC report that Home Secretary Amber Rudd had resigned.
For two weeks, British ministers have been struggling to explain why some descendants of the so-called “Windrush generation”, invited to Britain to plug labour shortfalls between 1948 and 1971, had been labelled as illegal immigrants.
The Windrush scandal overshadowed the Commonwealth summit in London and has raised questions about Theresa May’s six-year stint as interior minister before she became prime minister in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Rudd had faced repeated calls from the opposition Labour Party to resign after she gave contradictory statements about meeting targets for deportations.
May apologised to the black community on Thursday in a letter to The Voice, Britain’s national Afro-Caribbean newspaper.
“We have let you down and I am deeply sorry,” she said. “But apologies alone are not good enough. We must urgently right this historic wrong.”
