You can watch the news as much as you like, and still be late in finding out what's going on right at your doorstep.

When Liam Byrne visited Glasgow on 26 October this year, he promised a protocol for the removal of refused asylum seeking families, and cooperation with education and health services, in an attempt to calm the outrage caused by large groups of immigration officers breaking into people's homes at the crack of dawn to remove them without prior notice.

The press coverage was split. Some saw the promised protocol as a step in the right direction, even though an amnesty for families who've lived here for many years was outruled (I still don't get why the Home Office so fervently outrule such an amnesty but that's another point). The Herald, however, focused on the fact that there are 1500 refused asylum seekers in Scotland subject to removal and that they will be removed, whether children are involved or not. The implication is that these people are about to be removed.
 
Six weeks later, there is still no protocol, but in the last few days, there have been another 4 dawn raids on families. There has been a protest at the Immigration Centre in Glasgow's Brand Street, organised by the Unity Centre, a union for asylum seekers/refugees. Unfortunately, I still hear about these protests after they happen, so I'm sure protests could be even more effective if more people knew about it sooner. It's hard to spread the word though, there is after all no warning of immanent dawn raids or removals.

It is harder still to find any coverage on the internet, so I'm not quite managing to spread the word on this blog. What I was able to find out is contained in the links in this post.
Indymedia reports on the first of the new dawn raids, on 26th November, which failed because, and this is my interpretation of events, the family to be deported took refuge with a neighbour. BBC reports in a few words about the protest following the two dawn raids on 3rd and 4th December, news of which only reached me a few minutes ago. Both families are said to be detained at Dungavel and due to be deported at the weekend. The protest was called for by the Unity Centre, but as they don't manage an email list of supporters, I would assume that the protest was insignificant because not enough people heard about it in time.

In the meantime, Amnesty and the Refugee Council have started a major campaign on the destitution of asylume seekes, which is not entirely unrelated to the issue of dawn raids. It's another policy induced measure to make applying for asylum unattractive and to discourage people in general from applying for asylum in the UK. The government of course maintains that it only tries to discourage those abusing the system, however, the evidence indicates that this is not worth the paper it is written on.