By Josephine Whitaker-Yilmaz

I couldn't sleep on Monday night after watching Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announce brutal changes to the immigration system.

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Instead, I kept thinking about what it all meant for Julia. Julia is a teaching assistant and mother of two. When she's not working in schools, she's volunteering, cooking for her local church and raising two children born here in the UK.

This year, Julia was nearing the end of an arduous ten-year route to settlement, a key step toward British citizenship and the security of finally belonging. With just two months to go, she would finally reach what she had spent a decade working toward as she paid her taxes and built a life here: Indefinite Leave to Remain.

My colleagues at Praxis - a migrant rights charity – have supported Julia on this long and costly road, and there was hope on the horizon. No more hurdles to jump, no more Visa fees. But with the finishing line in sight, the government has yanked it away.

Under the new rules, Julia is now faced with another decade of uncertainty, bills in the thousands, and the overwhelming fear that the stage is now set for a far-right government to come in and deport her alongside hundreds of thousands of other families. All because her salary isn’t enough to make ends meet, so she has to rely on universal........

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