Journalism can often be a lonely and even competitive pursuit, one journalist digging away until they have their story.

But sometimes great things can happen when journalists team up.

This is one of those stories.

I'm Maeve McClendigan. This is the tip-off. I'm Maeve McLenigan. This is the tip-off.

I'm Samir Jaraj. I currently work at the New Statesman, but I was a freelancer at the time I did

this story. Back in 2016, Samir Jaraj had a day job. At the time I was working for a race equality charity.

But he always had an eye out for a story.

The charity he was working for had been doing all kinds of research into the hostile environment

and the impact the government's immigration policy was having on various areas of life.

Now this was before the wind rush scandal broke,

so there wasn't really much discussion going on about this. But Samir was interested in finding out

more. At the end of 2016, I started looking into data sharing agreements. There had been, I think, one that was known about

at the time, which was around the healthcare data being shared with the home office.

Then around the same time, there was an issue around education data. So the pupil census essentially kind of being

shared and potentially being used to target families because they had enrolled their child

in school. So we knew of some official organisations sharing information with immigration

authorities. But what about the police? He wondered.

So I had a theory which was that I wondered if victims of crime would be caught up in this system as well.

Samir knew the police would work with immigration officials when handling the perpetrators

of crime.

He wondered if the same was true for those who were victims of criminal acts.

This was too big a topic to look into on his own.

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