A county lines drug dealer avoided deportation after a judge ruled he does not “currently” pose an “actual risk to public security”. Stephan Gomes, from Cape Verde, convinced judges his Portuguese father meant he should be allowed to stay in the UK.
A Court of Appeal ruling in 2024 increased the threshold to deport EU nationals who have lived in the UK for at least 10 years. Gomes, who arrived in 1998, had a “leading” role in a drug network known as the “Justin Line”, selling cocaine and heroin in Portsmouth, and was jailed for eight and a half years in November 2020. In April 2022, then-home secretary Dame Priti Patel issued Gomes with a deportation order.
But he successfully appealed in February 2023.
The Home Office then fought this, appealing to the Upper Tribunal.
In January 2024, Gomes said he should be afforded greater protection because his father is Portuguese.
But the hearing was delayed until November last year because “evidence of the appellant’s father’s immigration status and nationality were not available”.
The Home Office accepted his father was Portuguese but stressed the drug dealer should still be deported because he had been convicted of a “serious drug offence”.
But the Court of Appeal ruling “established an ‘incredibly high’ threshold for the deportation of the appellant”.
And Upper Tribunal Judge, Mr Justice Lane, ruled: “Whilst I note the serious nature of the appellant’s offending, I note also that he has left prison and has not been convicted of further offences.
“The Offender Assessment System report assesses the appellant at being of a low risk of reoffending. It cannot, in my opinion, be said on the facts that the appellant currently poses an ‘actual risk to public security’.
“In the circumstances, I allow his appeal against the Secretary of State decision.”
Mr Justice Lane, explaining the new test, said criminals can only be deported if they are an “actual risk to public security – and, what is more, a risk so compelling as to justify the exceptional course of deporting him from a country into which he was now integrated by so many years’ residence”.
The court heard that police seized cash totalling £20-30,000 and 200 bundles of wraps suspected to be cocaine and heroin with a street value of £26,360 when Gomes and his accomplice, Gary Black, was arrested.
One of the bundles was found to contain 280 individual wraps of cocaine with a street value of £2,800.
In October 2024, the Court of Appeal ruled the threshold for deporting EU nationals should be increased if they have been living in the UK for at least 10 years.
It ruled WG, a Belgian national, should avoid deportation despite being convicted of manslaughter in a gangland murder plot.
Outlining Gomes’s criminal history, an immigration tribunal heard: “On June 5, 2020 the appellant was convicted on two counts of possession with intent to supply Class A controlled drugs, heroin and crack cocaine, and on two counts of being concerned in supplying Class A controlled drugs, cocaine and heroin and acquiring/ using/ possessing criminal property, between October 2019 and March 2020.
“On November 10, 2020 he was sentenced to eight years and six months’ imprisonment.
“The judge sentencing the appellant referred to him having been the person in charge of a county line known as the Justin Line, which he operated from his address in Croydon and which, over the period in question, supplied a large quantity of Class A drugs to the Portsmouth area.
“The judge considered that the appellant was well above the ordinary significant role dealer but well below the sort of leading role fulfilled by the elders sitting above him in the chain of command.”
But Hampshire Police said of his role: “Described as having a leading role in the conspiracy, Stephan Gomes, 31, of Donald Road, Croydon, London, pleaded guilty to two counts of possession with intent to supply cocaine and heroin and two counts of being concerned in the supply of Class A crack cocaine and heroin and was sentenced to eight years six months in prison.”