Foreign
UK: Over 100 migrants face deportation as care agency is stripped of ability to endorse visas
More than a hundred migrants and their families face being in Britain illegally after the company which sponsored them to come to work in the UK was stripped of its ability to endorse their visas.
Foreigners employed by care agency Renaissance Personnel in Brighton have just weeks to find a new sponsor or return home before their legal right to be in the country runs out.
The Home Office revoked the licence of Renaissance to bring in migrant workers over concerns about whether vacancies were genuine and whether staff were being paid.
Muhammad, 45, brought his wife and four children to Britain from Pakistan in April 2023 after being promised work as one of Renaissance Personnel’s care assistants.
Renting a small terraced house, his children attend local schools and play in the property’s tiny concrete-walled garden.
Muhammad tells Sky News: “They were having the dream that, okay, we will move to the UK. We will have great education. Now they are worried.”
He says they ask him: “‘Baba, what we will do?’ Always we will be going here, there and now we don’t have anywhere.”
Muhammad claims he paid £19,000 to a recruitment agent before being sent a certificate of sponsorship and job offer from Renaissance Personnel.
Renaissance Personnel maintains that the company has no connection to any foreign recruitment agents.
Soon after arriving in the UK, Muhammad realised there was no work for him.
His certificate of sponsorship, approved by the Home Office, states the urgent need for care workers at the company, with “1500 hours uncovered per week”.
Muhammad should have been guaranteed 39 hours of work per week, but says there was no contracted work available.
He begged the boss of Renaissance Personnel, Dennis Mawadzi, for an admin job and began working in the company’s Brighton office.
Never been inspected
Renaissance Personnel also operates in London and Buckinghamshire.
The Brighton arm was initially registered with the Care Quality Commission in January 2021 but has never been inspected.
Muhammad claims more than 150 foreign workers have been recruited for that site alone but says there’s only enough work for around 15 staff – a mixture of private referrals and local authority clients.
Brighton and Hove Council confirmed to Sky News that it had used Renaissance Personnel to deliver care to people in their homes, but that its contract involved only a small number of people.
A spokesperson said: “We currently have six clients placed with Renaissance Personnel and it informed us directly of both the recent investigation and the subsequent notice it has had its overseas sponsor licence revoked.
“When an overseas sponsor licence is suspended or revoked our practice is to pause all new referrals to that provider while we review any potential risks.”
Fajar, 20, arrived from Pakistan in June 2023 with a certificate of sponsorship from Renaissance and an offer of full-time care work.
He also claims he hasn’t been given the shifts he thought he’d secured: “I only worked for a few days, like three or four days in June. In last June. And after that I have not got any work.”
Fajar, 20, arrived from Pakistan in June 2023 but has not had the work he thought he had secured.
He says his parents gave £20,000 to an agent before he was sent his documents and he now needs to earn money in order to pay them back.
Fajar and Muhammad say they haven’t been paid by Renaissance Personnel for months – and they are not alone.
Sky News understands Mr Mawadzi hosted a virtual meeting for dozens of employees during which he explained the loss of sponsorship licence.
Muhammad, who was on the call, says workers were upset and angry, questioning what they should do and demanding to be paid.
There are more than 116,000 companies listed as “approved sponsors”, able to recruit people to come to the UK.
If a sponsor licence is no longer valid, the Home Office will notify employees giving them 60 days to find a new sponsor or return home.
Workers have ‘disappeared’
Fajar and Muhammad told Sky News that they have not been contacted by the Home Office about their status or any investigation into Renaissance Personnel.
Muhammad says the company has already lost contact with many of the people it sponsored to come here.
He says they have “disappeared” and could be working on the black market: “They may be doing cash jobs or maybe they are involved [in] some other activities here.”
Lawyers acting on behalf of Mr Mawadzi told Sky News they will be challenging the decision to revoke its sponsorship licence, adding: “Our client denies all allegations and refutes the claim that they have hired more foreign staff than they had hours to allocate.
“It is essential to comprehend the unique nature of the domiciliary care service industry, where hours are inherently variable and not guaranteed.
“At the time of recruitment, our client employed migrant workers to address a significant number of unfilled hours in Brighton and Hove…The exact number of foreign staff currently employed, and the guaranteed hours cannot be precisely determined due to the non-static and demand-driven nature of the industry.”
The lawyers add that a “delay in payment” to staff occurred because “our client business accounts and commercial finance facilities were closed without sufficient notice” adding “all staff will be fully paid”.
They say: “We understand the concern raised regarding allegations that staff members paid agents for certificates of sponsorship through Renaissance… our company strictly adheres to transparent recruitment processes…Upon becoming aware of such incidents, Renaissance promptly involves relevant authorities.”
They add: “We provide comprehensive safety and sensitivity training to all employees” and say the allegation of losing contact with workers is untrue, telling Sky News that workers “who do not report back to the company are straight away reported to the Home Office within 10 days… apart from workers who have been reported to the Home Office, the sponsor is in contact with the remaining workers.”
The previous government did not provide Sky News with an answer as to why Renaissance Personnel had been able to bring in so many foreign workers to the UK before its sponsorship licence was revoked.
Following the general election, a spokesperson for the Home Office told Sky News “exploitation of migrant care workers is completely unacceptable. Where exploitation does occur, we will take robust action.
“Care providers acting as sponsors for migrants in England must be registered with the industry regulator, the Care Quality Commission, to crack down on abuse within the sector.
“We are working hard across government and with the sector to ensure high standards across the immigration system, and to support care workers into alternative jobs when their sponsor has had their licence removed.”
Renaissance Personnel is not the only care agency under investigation for allegedly sponsoring foreign workers to come to the UK for jobs that do not exist.
The challenge for the new home secretary will be how to deal with people who find themselves in the country illegally because of a crackdown on who can sponsor workers to come into Britain.
A Nigerian-born Roman Catholic priest, Anthony Odiong, has been convicted by a jury in Texas, United States, for sexually assaulting women under his spiritual care, The Guardian reports.
Odiong, 57, was found guilty on one count of first-degree sexual assault and two counts of second-degree sexual assault after a trial in Waco, Texas.
The jury, made up of eight women and four men, delivered its verdict after about two hours of deliberation on Friday.
The court heard testimony from two women who said Odiong used his role as a priest to manipulate and pressure them into sexual relationships.
He was accused of exploiting his position as a Catholic priest to pursue sexual relationships with women he was providing spiritual direction.
Odiong, who pleaded not guilty, could face life imprisonment on the first-degree charge when sentencing begins on Monday.
Prosecutors said the offences involved two women who testified in court that the priest abused his clerical authority during periods of emotional vulnerability.
One of the women, identified in court documents as Mary Doe, told the jury that Odiong began a sexual relationship with her while providing spiritual counselling during a difficult divorce.
She also testified that her son once walked in on her and Odiong during intercourse at her home.
Another woman, Jane Doe, testified that he pressured her into sexual acts under the guise of spiritual guidance.
The case followed a 2024 report by The Guardian, which first documented allegations of sexual misconduct and coercion against the priest during his ministry in Texas and Louisiana.
Prosecutors said that report prompted one of the victims to come forward to police with further allegations.
Investigators later gathered additional evidence, including DNA linked to a child fathered by Odiong during his time in Louisiana.
Odiong, a naturalised US citizen, was ordained in Nigeria in 1993 and later served in Catholic parishes in Texas and Louisiana.
Authorities said he was suspended from the ministry in 2019 following earlier allegations of misconduct.
His lawyers argued during the trial that the relationships were consensual, but prosecutors maintained that he abused his position of authority as a clergy member.
A United States-based 23 year old tech-developer, Tony Kabilan Okeke, led a five-man team of Drexel University, Philadelphia, Penn., U.S. alumni and students to develop Xploit, an automated cybersecurity testing tool for AI agents, an ambitious concept that addresses a growing problem in AI landscape.
Beside Tony Okeke who is the Team Lead, other members of the team are Kamdi Okeke, Kiitan Fawole, Dalu Okonkwo and Michael Moemeke.
Speaking to our reporter on the development, Tony said, “As more businesses deploy AI agents that can take actions and use tools on behalf of customers, these systems become potential security risks. Unlike simple AI assistants, agents have access to tools and can perform real actions – meaning a security vulnerability isn’t just a PR problem, it could have serious real-world consequences.”
3rd from right, Team lead, Tony, Kamdi, Dalu, flanked by UEV partners
The team envisioned a tool that could automatically test an AI agent for vulnerabilities – essentially playing the role of a digital attacker to identify weaknesses before real threats could exploit them. This was the outcome of their brainstorming on November 21, 2025, when Tony led the group to build and pitch Xploit in the “Start-Up In a Weekend” Hackathon hosted on November 21 – 23, 2025 in Philadelphia, by The Foundry & Velric, a Philadelphia-based founder-first community that act as a startup ecosystem catalyst.
Tony designed the system’s architecture and created the initial prototype of the user interface (UI). The UI concept was crucial: it needed to visually show how their automated attacker was thinking, strategizing, and attempting different approaches in real-time, all displayed through interactive graph showing the attack process as it unfolded.
Responsibilities were strategically divided amongst the team. Some members created sample AI agents to serve as “victims” for testing. Tony developed the core attacking system. One person refined the user interface, and others handled the technical infrastructure connecting all the pieces together.
The attacking system itself works like a strategic game player. It would first choose an attack strategy, then create a detailed plan, execute that plan step-by-step by sending messages to the target AI agent, and analyze the responses to determine whether to continue or try a different approach. Throughout this process, the web interface displayed everything happening in real-time, allowing users to watch the automated tester work.
The team then integrated everything — making the attacker communicate with the victim AI agent systems, ensuring the automated testing loop ran smoothly, and polishing the final product. They recorded their demo video and submitted their project before the 9 am deadline on November 23, 2025.
During the afternoon judging session, the team delivered their pitch, framing their project around a massive, unaddressed market shift, highlighting a critical market gap: while the explosion of AI agents in 2025 has seen enterprises deploy them to manage everything from infrastructure to sensitive tasks like financial analysis and customer support, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are left vulnerable because they cannot afford to test them for security flaws. Unlike tech giants, SMBs lack the resources for dedicated AI security teams. Xploit, automated cybersecurity tool, directly addresses this need, positioning itself within a booming continuous automated red-teaming market projected to skyrocket from $495 million in 2024 to $4.9 billion by 2032. Xploit democratizes AI safety, levels the playing field, allowing any business to automatically test and secure their AI agents before deployment.
The judges were impressed enough that they took an unusual step — they asked to see the team’s code and development history to verify the project had actually been built during the hackathon weekend. This verification was necessary because the judges found it hard to believe such a polished product could be created in just one weekend.
The team won the “new project track” award and $1,500 in prize money.
“What made the achievement particularly remarkable” according to Kamdi Okeke, “wasn’t just that we built it over a weekend — it was that, competing amongst a diverse group of 100+ of Philadelphia’s most driven creators, we built Xploit in less than a day of actual development time, transforming an abstract idea into a working, polished prototype through focused collaboration and strategic planning.”
Speaking further, Tony said, “The experience at yet another hackathon, UEV’s Venture Building Weekend hosted in Philadelphia, March 12 – 14, 2026, was a turning point for us. The mentorship and feedback we received from industry operators helped sharpen how we think about the problem and where our approach fits in the market.”
United Effects Ventures (UEV) is a Philadelphia-based pre-seed venture studio. Through its Venture Building Weekend, a competitive hackathon, focused on problem validation and go-to-market strategy, teams refined their ideas with guidance from experienced operators and investors. After a grueling 48-hour sprint, Xploit came tops, outperformed 15 other competing teams, earning a cash award and two advisory sessions with partners at UEV; and most importantly, industry experts validated Xploit’s focus on continuous red-teaming as a strong approach to discovering vulnerabilities in AI-powered products.
Mentors at the hackathon validated both the team’s identification of the problem – the growing security risks posed by AI agents operating autonomously in enterprise environment – and their approach of framing the product as continuous red-teaming platform, which could support an ongoing service model.
The accusation comes after US Central Command said its forces had on Monday attacked missile sites and boats in southern Iran that were trying to lay mines in the Gulf, while Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said it fired at US aircraft trying to enter its airspace.
“The US terrorist army, continuing its illegal and unjustified actions since the ceasefire… has, in the past 48 hours, committed a gross violation of the ceasefire in the Hormozgan region,” the Iranian foreign ministry said in a statement.
It added that Tehran “will not leave any evil unanswered and will not hesitate to defend the Iranian nation,” without elaborating.
Tuesday’s statement came as a top Iranian delegation was in Qatar for talks as part of a “diplomatic process” aimed at ending the war with the United States, which broke out on February 28.
AFP
Iranian authorities held mass public weddings in Tehran for couples who signed up to a state-sponsored scheme declaring their readiness to sacrifice their lives in the war against the US and Israel.
The ceremonies conducted late on Monday involved hundreds of couples in several major squares in the capital, including more than 100 in the vast Imam Hossein square in central Tehran, according to reports in Iranian media.
They were broadcast on state TV in a bid to boost wartime morale, with US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatening new military action against Iran amid a shaky ceasefire which halted the fighting that began on February 28.
Those involved had signed up, according to Iranian media, for the so-called “self-sacrifice” scheme (janfada in Persian) where people pledged to put their lives on the line in the war by, for example, forming human chains outside power stations.
Iranian authorities say millions of people, including top figures such as the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and President Masoud Pezeshkian, have put their names forward.
Couples arrived at the Imam Hossein square in military jeeps with mounted machine guns and were married on a stage in a ceremony presided over by a cleric, AFP images showed.
The stage was festooned with balloons and with a giant image of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who has yet to appear in public since being elevated to the position after the killing of his father and predecessor, Ali Khamenei, on the first day of the war.
“Certainly, the country is at war, but young people also have the right to marry,” one young woman in a white Islamic bridal dress, who was not named, said beside her groom in footage published by the Mehr news agency.
A man in a dark suit, beside his bride-to-be, said they were happy the occasion marked the anniversary of the marriage of the Prophet Ali, revered by Shia Muslims, to Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed.
“We received their blessings. Furthermore, we came to offer our best wishes to the people in the streets,” he said.
Mehr said 110 couples had taken part in the Imam Hossein Square ceremony alone. The AFP images showed crowds of well-wishers clasping roses and watching on.
Since the start of the war, Iranian authorities have held, on a near-daily basis, major pro-government gatherings in a bid to highlight popular mobilisation amid the conflict.
AFP
The Nigerian community in the United States has been thrown into mourning following the sudden death of Eric Ezeokoli, a student of California State University, Long Beach.
Ezeokoli, who was born on October 6, 1960, reportedly died on Friday, April 11, 2026, at Saint Mary’s Hospital after a brief illness.
Until his death, he was studying Engineering at the university, also known as Long Beach State University. Sources disclosed that he had previously lived in San Jose before relocating to the Los Angeles area.
Tragically, at the time of his passing, Ezeokoli was said to be homeless and living in his car, with no fixed address.
The deceased was originally from Anambra State, although details about his exact hometown remain unclear. There are indications he may have hailed from Aguata, but this has not been officially confirmed.
Efforts are currently underway to locate his family members and relatives in Nigeria. Members of the Nigerian community and concerned individuals are appealing to anyone with useful information about Ezeokoli’s background or family to come forward.
A contact person, Paul Kizito Eze, has been designated to receive information that could help trace the deceased’s relatives.
The appeal has also been extended to people from Anambra State, particularly those familiar with communities in Aguata, to assist in identifying and notifying the family.
The situation has sparked renewed concern over the welfare of some Nigerians living abroad, especially those facing hardship and isolation.
Anyone with relevant information is urged to reach out urgently to assist in reconnecting the late Ezeokoli with his family for proper burial arrangements.
-
News4 days agoPower Doesn’t Last Forever, It Has Expiry Date — VeryDarkMan Warns Wike
-
Politics4 days agoSpeaker suspended over anti-party activities
-
Crime4 days agoEnugu Police Foil Kidnap Attempt, kill 2 Suspects, Recover AK-47, Other Weapons
-
Crime3 days agoPosters of Abducted Seven Teachers, 39 Pupils Flood Oyo Communities
-
News4 days agoRights Group Petitions IGP, Seeks Probe of Police Role in Controversial Enugu Land Disputes
-
Crime3 days agoAbducted Students: Oyo Assembly refuses to negotiatie with bandits
-
News4 days agoPolice Declare 6 IPOB Members Wanted Over Protests Against Kanu’s Jail Terms
-
Politics3 days agoAide Sacked For Advising President Tinubu To Resign