Grenfell. Witness Protection.

Many accounts London’s first iconic inferno — the Great Fire of 1666 — marvel at the miraculous fact that so few died. Reports vary, but the settled number is six — only six — people perished as the flames ripped a path of desolation through the city. Most of them choked to death on the fumes. Some however, are casting doubt on that extraordinarily low toll. Though we know the names of only six people who died, the fire turned nearly a third of the city to a smouldering heap of ash and charred timber. According to some historians, it seems unlikely that all the denizens of that third made it out alive — particularly those in the poorer quarters, who couldn’t hot foot it out on private coaches, who stayed to beat the flames back from their homes. Houses were thrown together in untended, cramped conditions, crammed with wax and turpentine, lined with flammable material like thatch. The fire consumed them easily. But the fire made proper record-keeping nigh-on impossible — and with no deeds, no death certificates, no censuses, no neighbours left to report families disappeared, we will simply never be certain of the number.

Counting the dead of Grenfell is no breezy roll-call exercise. In the chaos left in its wake, we cannot simply count the living and see whose names have gone unanswered. It would be tricky enough for any large residence; people go on holiday, they stay out all night, they have guests, they sublet their rooms. But the case of Grenfell is trickier still. Like any other tower block you’d care to name, among its former residents are people with insecure migration status — undocumented migrants, failed asylum seekers, people who’ve outstayed their visas. With no access to public support and every reason to avoid the scrutiny of border enforcement by dodging formal rental agreements, people end up staying with family, sofa-surfing or subletting under the radar. But without the testimony of these people, we may never know for certain who died in the inquest. In response to this conundrum, Diane Abbott called for a full migrant amnesty: that those irregular migrants who come forward as victims of (and witnesses to) the tragedy at Grenfell should be granted indefinite leave to remain, as well as access to the services needed to begin, tentatively, to rebuild their lives.

A minimal measure, you might think, to ensure that the public enquiry or inquest has the best possible information to hand — and to spare survivors the secondary trauma of summary deportation. In order to finally settle the question still lingering over Grenfell, the government might have to do its most dizzying policy U-turn yet — roll back on its determined course to make britain a “hostile environment” for migrants. In response perhaps to still-fuming public outrage, the government have offered a sop to still-fuming public outrage; that anyone irregular migrants will be granted a twelve month period of amnesty. During this time they can work, be housed, gain access to public funds; all the basics supposedly afforded those with a british passport. This rather skirts the question of what happens after those twelve months are over. After they’ve come forward, registered for work and housing support — after local authorities will know exactly who and where they are. After those twelve months, immigration officers known for ghosting migrants into detention and onto charter flights in the middle of the night, will know exactly whose door to knock on.

That’s a big risk to run. Those who fall foul of UK Border Agency can be detained indefinitely without charge and without trial in immigration detention centres, which are dogged by reports of squalid conditions in which disease runs rampant. In her tenure as Home Secretary, Theresa May denied UN Special rapporteur on women’s rights access to the notorious Yarls Wood Detention facilitaty, after its staff were accused of repeated counts of physical abuse and sexual abuse. This is to say nothing of the mental distress caused by stagnating in indefinite detention, a legal power available to border enforcement no other country in Europe. After being deported to Jamaica, one former detainee told researcher Luke de Noronha “If you’re not mindsharp, they will fuck your head. They will destroy you. They will ruin you. Brick by brick. Block by block.”

Many migrants threatened with detention and deportation have been here for decades — building lives, building communities, building families. Recently released from Yarls Wood after a successful legal appeal, Mabel Gawanas spent nearly three years locked away from her two young children. Many migrants come to the country as children, meaning some have been have not known any other country as an adult. For these individuals, the prospect of removal means being torn away from family, jobs, friends, and support networks, and dropped into the middle of an unknown country. This fact carries little weight in the home offices efforts to determine where they are ‘from’. Until the practise was deemed illegal by the European Court of Justice, LGBT asylum seekers could only avoid removal by ‘proving’ their sexuality. This sometimes involved submitting explicit, personal images and videos to the UK courts.

Even those with pending judicial reviews or asylum claims can be removed on charter flights back to ‘popular destinations’; Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana, Jamaica, Sri Lanka. these charter flights have been criticised for landing asylum seekers right back in the middle of war zones, or places in which they risk harm or death — flouting international law on non-refoulement of asylum seekers. In 2013, the government was ready to load Tamil migrants onto planes back to Sri Lanka where they faced being tortured. This was stymied last minute by a high court intervention — an inconvenience that the government has proved keen to avoid. Letters sent from the Home Office to the Royal Courts of Justice before removal flights outline that due to the “costs involved in arranging charter flights, it is essential that these removals are not disrupted or delayed by large numbers of last minute claims for permission to seek judicial review.” Repeatedly, the Home Office has stressed that such flights are principally a cost-saving measure. Coorporate watch have shown that they don’t even sucessfully cut costs — but perhaps this is of little consequence. Under the logic of austerity, the need to cut costs operates more as an ideological excuse than a financial imperative. The contents of the final tally-sheet are immaterial; invoke the name of austerity, and all sins are pardoned.

For anyone who has been following the coverage of Grenfell, this may come as little surprise. The disaster unveiled the breathtaking profundity of official contempt for the lives of those with no money, those traditionally shut out of the halls of power in which reports can be quitely ignored, housing merrily defunded. Government at both the local and national level has proved itself of using the fraudulent need to ‘cut costs’ as a reason to dismantle protections that serve the most vulnerable in society. So why should the irregular migrants of Grenfell come forward? Hidden as they are, those who survived this crime against London’s they’ve found some sort of informal witness protection, cloistering themselves (for now) from the vicissitudes of its perpetrators: our very own government.