Everybody to Kenmure Street: Immigration protest film tells a remarkable story of people power

On the morning of Eid, on 13 May 2021, Tabassum Niamat was waiting at home for her family to visit. All her cooking for the big celebration was out of the way. And then the text messages started coming through: an immigration van was on Kenmure Street. 

“I didn’t have any inkling how long this was going to take, all I knew is I want to be there,” she says.

So Niamat went down to where neighbours on her street in Glasgow had begun to gather around the van, which had come at 9am to detain two men. The details weren’t really known, and the protest had no real leaders, but over the course of the day the crowd grew from a smattering of people to hundreds, coming from all over the city. It was simple: the Home Office couldn’t take the men, Indian Sikhs, away with all the people filling the road.

This act of resistance snowballed into a national story, news crews descending and police resources flooding to the area as the standoff continued. By 5pm, there was a decision: police released the men.

“For those eight hours I saw the best in humanity. I saw exactly what is possible when we can put our differences to one side. We may not even agree on everything, but what happens when we collectively come together and decide, ‘No, not on our watch. It’s not happening here’,” says Niamat.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

The events of that day have now been made into a film, Everybody to Kenmure Street. Ahead of its release in the UK, the Emma Thompson-produced documentary opened the Glasgow Film Festival last week having already won an award at Sundance. At the time, the Kenmure Street protest sat alongside a wave of similar grassroots action – the year before protesters had dumped a statue of Edward Colston into Bristol’s harbour; a year later, 200 protesters in Peckham would force police to free a man from an immigration van.

Yet since then, successive governments have acted to make protest harder and asylum more restricted. The day after the Kenmure Street protest, the Home Office characterised the crowd as a “mob”.

Read more:

• Immigration is inevitable. Let’s make it work
• From anti-war to Palestine Action: The way we protest is changing – so how did we get here?
• Immigration is a positive. It’s time the UK accepted that fact.

Kenmure Street sits south of the Clyde between Govanhill and Pollokshields, two of the city’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Over the centuries, this side of town has accepted wave after wave of immigrants, from Irish in the 19th century, to east European Jews fleeing tyranny, to Indian subcontinent workers helping Scotland’s economy. After the Immigration and Asylum Act of the late 1990s, Glasgow became the main dispersal city for refugees and asylum seekers in Scotland. 

Today, around 4,000 people living there are awaiting a decision on their asylum application – a higher number than any other city in the UK. It was the networks of support which had been built up to welcome these new migrants who were at the forefront of the massive outpouring of solidarity on Kenmure Street. 

The documentary – released amid protests against asylum hotels, the rise of anti-immigrant politics, and a state-side flashpoint over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – tells a story of community resistance that resonates far beyond a single street. Director Felipe Bustos Sierra combined real footage from the day with dramatisation – Emma Thompson provides the voice of ‘Van Man’ and fellow actor Kate Dickie plays a nurse.

“In some ways it felt like the Home Office walked into a bit of an ambush,” says Bustos Sierra, whose own father was a refugee from Chile. The director lives near Kenmure Street but decided not to go. “I didn’t think any good would come of it,” he says.

The next day, though, he had decided he wanted to make a film about the protest. “What has been lacking that I didn’t have that impulse to go?” he wondered. “There was a sense of a community having been on the receiving end of bigotry and racism for centuries.”

Bustos Sierra had already won directing plaudits for Nae Pasaran, another film about Scottish people standing up, based on the East Kilbride Rolls Royce factory refusal to make parts for Pinochet’s regime. He adds: “It was people just turning up to a protest, not really knowing that they had any power to change, just wanting to see what happens.”

For Niamat, a Muslim from a Pakistani family who was born in Scotland, the swell of pride from the protest is tempered by a feeling of fragility. 

“In the future, if there is something like Kenmure Street again, it could be deemed as something against the government, or with the language around protest and the policing bill, that this person isn’t aligned with the government or this country; this is treacherous. That in itself could be reason enough to strip someone like me of my citizenship,” she says.

“There’s this fear, or this realisation, that my position in this country is very fragile compared to any of my white counterparts. We might do the same activism, but the consequences for me are going to be very different to the consequences for someone else whose parents and grandparents and lineage can be traced back hundreds of years in this country.”

The film is being released as protests continue in the US against the mass deportation of immigrants carried out by ICE. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by immigration agents sparked a fresh wave of people taking to the streets.

Niamat describes travelling to the US to promote the film at Sundance as “terrifying”. After all, it’s a film about how inspiring it is to stand up to immigration police.

“The fear for me is what’s happening in America with ICE is something that Reform and our UK government is playing right into the hands of. What’s happening with ICE there could be a reality for us in Britain if things don’t change. If this media narrative continues, we’re going to be in the exact same boat as America,” says Niamat.

Aamer Anwar decided not to go on the trip to America. The lawyer represents the family of Sheku Bayoh, a black man who died in police custody in Kirkcaldy in 2015 – with the inquiry still ongoing over a decade later. He has also taken on cases including that of the family of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi over a potential miscarriage of justice, explains: “If I go I’m liable to be detained by immigration. It’s not going to be a pleasant experience.”

Anwar played a pivotal role on that day in 2021, negotiating with police to secure the release of the two men in the van. “This had the potential for destroying the hard work that had gone on in this community,” he says. If police wanted to get heavy, he told them, fine, but they’d be picking up the pieces for decades. “I said Priti Patel was about to set off a powder keg in the heart of the most diverse community in Scotland.”

This was a nervy moment. The stakes were high if it went wrong. “I knew as a lawyer, professionally, at this point, I thought this is the end of my career, because I will be targeted by the tabloids, by people saying you’ve helped incite this,” he says.

Yet Anwar believes the new wave of anti-protest laws wouldn’t stop Kenmure Street happening in 2026. “Yes, it’s dangerous times with protest laws, but ultimately it comes down to what I was taught as a young activist: the power of the people. The more people that you have, ultimately that carries weight.”

When Big Issue asks Alison Phipps, the Unesco chair in refugee integration at the University of Glasgow, whether new laws could stop a protest like Kenmure Street taking place now, she turns to the example of Palestine Action protesters: “For a crime that potentially carries a life sentence, we have seen 2,700 people arrested for holding a placard.”

Phipps, who was also at Kenmure Street on the day, points to the protest as a leaderless event, tied to Glasgow’s history of organising as one, shaped by hardship, poverty and previous protest. 

“All of that came together into a context of protest, direct action and a withdrawal of consent from the state by the people of Kenmure Street,” she says. 

“We are seeing this at the moment in Minneapolis, a movement of people who say ‘No, not in our name’, and in big enough numbers for that to mean that the state is having to think again.”

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Change a vendor’s life this winter.

Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week – and always take the magazine. It’s how vendors earn with dignity and how we fund our work to end poverty.

You can also support online with a vendor support kit or a magazine subscription. Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.