Jean Charles de Menezes was killed by armed police at Stockwell tube station in London in July 2005. They mistakenly believed he was a suicide bomber. But the prejudice and discrimination which led to that error still persists, affecting Brazilians and other Latin Americans, and contributing to exclusion, unjustified arrests, and deportations.
This article was first published in Border Criminologies, Faculty of Law Blogs, University of Oxford, with the title: From Invisibility to Vulnerability: Twenty Years After Menezes and the Ongoing Erasure and Criminalization of Brazilians in the UK. It is reposted here by kind permission of the author. You can read the original here.
In July 2025, we mark twenty years since Jean Charles de Menezes, an unarmed 27-year-old Brazilian national, was shot eight times by Metropolitan Police officers at Stockwell station in south London. His killing, part of a counter-terrorism operation following the 7/7 bombings, became a symbol of racialized policing and state violence in post-9/11 Britain. The Met Police mistook him for a suicide bomber, noting he had “Mongolian eyes”. This event, now the subject of a fictionalized television series, marked the entry of Brazilians into public consciousness in the UK through the lens of state-led violence.
The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes exemplifies how racialized assumptions about threat become operationalized through policing. Menezes was misidentified, surveilled, and killed because he “looked suspicious”, an assessment based on the intersection of race, class, and migration status. The subsequent investigation revealed multiple institutional failures. Although the Met was fined £175,000 and ordered to pay £385,000 in costs after being found guilty of endangering the public, no individual was held accountable.
Detention and deportation: criminalizing Brazilian migrants
Two decades on, the structural conditions that enabled this tragedy not only remain largely intact, but have been further entrenched. In 2024, the Home Office deported more than 600 Brazilians, including 109 children, via charter flights, quietly and without public scrutiny. These removals took place under the current Labour government, which has committed to “efficient” border enforcement. While framed as voluntary returns, many of them were conducted in detention contexts under coercive conditions. One high-profile case that drew media attention involved a Brazilian family whose children, Guilherme, 11, and Luca, 7, were issued removal notices by the Home Office—even though their parents had been granted permission to stay in the UK.
In my advocacy work with detainees, I have documented first-hand accounts of Brazilians subjected to indefinite detention, medical neglect, and re-traumatization. Many are survivors of torture, gang violence, or persecution in Brazil. Yet their asylum claims are often dismissed on evidentiary grounds that fail to account for the specificities of structural violence in their country of origin.
Lucas (name changed), who overstayed his visa and worked as a food delivery driver, was detained for several weeks in the UK without due process. He showed me burn marks on his legs from torture in Brazil. Denied trauma-informed care, he was also subjected to abuse by legal professionals who claimed to represent him. Despite suffering from health complications, no Portuguese interpreter was available. The only person he had close relationships in the UK was his wife who, fearful of being detained herself, was unable to visit him. Lucas’s experience is not isolated, it reflects systemic flaws in how the UK processes, and frequently discredits, claims from Latin American nationals. These claims are often dismissed on the basis of blanket assumptions that categorize Brazil as a universally “safe” country, overlooking the complex and uneven realities of violence and insecurity that affect different communities.
Community presence
The killing of Jean Charles also drew attention to the growing Brazilian presence in the UK, particularly in London. Following diversification of migration patterns to Britain, Brazilians and other Latin Americans—despite lacking postcolonial ties—have established dynamic communities. Cultural spaces such as nightclubs, restaurants, and festivals celebrate Brazilian identity, while grassroots organizations have built robust infrastructures of support. Although some Brazilian migrants are highly skilled, many report being deskilled in the job market, experiencing gender-based violence, and facing exclusion and deportation under strict border regimes.
Organizations such as the Latin American Women’s Rights Service, Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organization, and the Latin American Disabled People’s Project provide vital services in areas neglected by the state: legal advice, mental health support, housing advocacy, and community organizing. Brazilian-owned barbershops and small businesses thrive in areas like Southwark, where persistent lobbying led the council to be the first to officially recognize Latin Americans as an ethnic category. However, this remains the exception rather than the norm.
At the national level, Latin Americans continue to be collapsed into “Other” categories in official data, despite being more than 250,000 and constituting a 395% increase in England and Wales between 2001 and 2021. The UK government’s failure to recognize Latin Americans as an ethnic group is not simply an oversight, but a form of institutional erasure. Without visibility in data and policy, Latin Americans are excluded from targeted funding, service provision, and policy reform. Invisibility, in this context, is a political condition that exacerbates vulnerability and enables abuse.
A hostile environment
As anti-immigration policies harden and hostile environment measures become increasingly normalized, Brazilian migrants in the UK face heightened suspicion, surveillance, and institutional neglect. The Labour government’s recently announced migration white paper proposes reducing legal migration routes, a move that will likely push more people into irregular channels. This will only deepen precarity, making it more difficult for migrants to access healthcare, report crimes, or claim employment rights.
These dynamics—racialized suspicion, bureaucratic indifference, and the denial of personhood—are not new. They are the same structural logics that enabled the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and continue to place racialized migrants at risk today. While Brazilian communities have responded with resilience and self-organization, recognition and justice require more than community-led efforts.
As scholars, practitioners, and members of the migration research community, we must interrogate how migration regimes manufacture vulnerability and amplify the voices of those who, like Menezes, are too often treated as collateral damage in the name of border control. Recognition is not just a matter of representation, it is a precondition for justice.
Dr. Thi Bogossian (they/them) is a Brazilian Teaching Fellow at the School of Global Development, University of East Anglia. Their work focuses on the intersections of migration, inequality, marginalization, education, and childhood, with a strong emphasis on social justice.
Main image: screenshot from documentary ‘Jean Charles de Menezes – 10th Anniversary’, BBC
