EPPING, United Kingdom — The mothers of Epping file into the fenced enclosure across the road from the Bell Hotel. Since early 2024, the government has filled the 79-room hotel with male asylum seekers against the wishes of the local people and the local council—and these women believe that their children are at risk.
The protests’ proximate cause is the case of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu. He is a 38-year-old Ethiopian who, his lawyer says, arrived “informally on a boat” and claimed asylum in Britain on June 29. He was sent to the Bell Hotel soon afterward. On his seventh and eighth days in Britain, Kebatu propositioned and forcibly attempted to kiss a 14-year-old local girl in a nearby restaurant and made similar advances to two other young girls.
On July 17, the day Kebatu was charged with “three counts of sexual assault, one count of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity, and one count of harassment without violence,” more than a thousand locals protested at the hotel, chanting “save our kids.”
“I just want the hotel to be moved, not only off our streets, but away from making any other family feel how we’re feeling right now,” the 14-year-old’s father said in a letter to the town council. “It’s not fair that the Government are putting our children and grandchildren at risk, even their own.”
In the days since that first spontaneous protest, hundreds of far-left activists—habitual agitators such as Stand Up to Racism and the Socialist Workers Party—came to Epping to defend the asylum seekers. The far right came too, including, a local woman told me, members of the neo-Nazi group Combat 18.
