06 July 2026 , 19:30
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“You won’t last long when this ends…We know where you are, we know who works for you and we are watching every step you take. Step out of line again and watch what happens.”
As reported by The Bureau Investigates, this sinister email was among the hundreds sent last August to City of Sanctuary, a small charity founded by a Methodist minister to promote a culture of welcome and support for asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.
A few days earlier the charity had been dragged into a media storm over its “Schools of Sanctuary” programme. The scheme asks schools from nurseries to sixth form colleges to commit to creating an environment of kindness for those forced to flee their homes to avoid war or persecution.
The furore was triggered by an article by a rightwing blogger, which was later picked up by the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and GB News, among others.
The Telegraph’s article was headlined “Schoolchildren as young as five write Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers”. It quoted the Conservative shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, who said children were being “weaponised to push a dangerous ideology”.
Far-right activists, including one who was recently charged for alleged rioting in Belfast, accused the charity of grooming children and forcing them to write “love letters”. One emailer even talked about burning down schools involved in the scheme. “We will all be watching and monitoring you people. There will be no escape,” he wrote.
Another Conservative MP, former education secretary Gavin Williamson, filed a complaint against City of Sanctuary with the Charity Commission, alleging that it had at times spread “misleading content”.
If all of this was true, it would have been cause for concern. In reality, as the commission later ruled after an investigation, it was all part of “a misinformation campaign” against City of Sanctuary.
The regulator said children had actually written heart-shaped messages of welcome for refugees that were then displayed in schools and at the premises of a charity that supported refugees. At no point had any child written to an individual asylum seeker.
Yet nine months after the initial media frenzy, City of Sanctuary and its staff are still receiving abusive and threatening messages.
They’re not alone. Last year, in response to a poll of 33 organisations in the migrant and refugee sector, 61% said they had faced hostility and abuse. Most of this was via social media, but a significant proportion was in emails and intimidating phone calls.
The poll was conducted by IMIX, a charity that supports migration sector organisations with communications and media relations. Its CEO, the former journalist Jenni Regan, said that while the sector has always faced some level of abuse, it has intensified recently.
In 2024, a Nazi sympathiser was found by a court to have prepared a terrorist attack on an immigration law firm after reading about them in a Daily Mail article, the BBC reported. More recently the personal details of some members of staff at NGOs were shared online with threatening comments.
Regan said many charities have had to remove the names and photos of trustees and staff from their websites and public records, while others have even built panic rooms in their offices.
“The scale right now is genuinely alarming,” Regan said. “It is not a new phenomenon but it has accelerated sharply in the past two years, and what has changed is not just the speed and coordination of disinformation, but the fact that political figures who once kept their distance from this content are now actively amplifying it.”
City of Sanctuary had already deleted personal details about staff from its website, but this didn’t prevent the torrent of abuse they faced in August from impacting them, said the charity’s CEO Siân Summers-Rees.
“They were experiencing panic attacks [and] had to have therapy,” she said. “For me, it’s just an overwhelming anxiety … just that constant high alert and I’ve ended up with high blood pressure.”
Summers-Rees said she had nightmares after receiving a message that read: “Hope your kids get got by a Muslim.”
The charity reported the abuse it has received, including copies of many threatening emails, to the police. Northumbria police told us that “despite extensive enquiries being carried out, a suspect could not be identified”.
A Daily Mail spokesperson told us the paper stood by its reporting and that it had not been criticised by the Charity Commission.
They said the articles, including one titled “Schoolchildren as young as five are asked to ’write Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers’,” did not say that children had written to individual asylum seekers. They said it “accurately reported” that children had been asked to write letters, “some of which were sent to refugee charities”.
The Telegraph, GB News and Philp did not respond to requests for comment on anything in this article.
Anatomy of a misinformation campaign
City of Sanctuary was founded in 2005 by Inderjit Bhogal OBE, a Methodist minister who came to the UK as a refugee when he was 11 years old, and Craig Barnett, a Quaker.
It coordinates a network of organisations like churches, schools and councils, as well as volunteers – many of them pensioners – to support refugees and asylum seekers and help them feel welcome in the UK.
Despite being a small organisation – it has only ten staff, all of them women – it has attracted a disproportionate amount of rightwing media attention.
Charlotte Gill, a freelance journalist, has published more than 20 posts about the charity or its activities on her Substack, where she promises to investigate “government waste and left-wing funding, so you don’t have to!”
In a video posted on X last August, she said the charity’s Schools of Sanctuary programme was encouraging children to write Valentine’s letters to asylum seekers.
“Remember, these seem to be a lot of male economic migrants now … some responsible for some terrible crimes, some involving children,” she said in the video which now has more than 14 million views.
City of Sanctuary told us that Gill did not contact them to check her facts or get their side of the story, as is standard journalistic practice. We emailed Gill twice and messaged her on social media to give her a chance to comment on this article, but she did not respond.
The claim that children were sending Valentines to asylum seekers quickly spread via the Telegraph, the Mail, GB News, and on social media.
The most sustained coverage came from GB News. Over the past year it has mentioned City of Sanctuary in at least 40 broadcasts. The day after the Telegraph story was published, GB News posted a YouTube video saying children had been “forced” to write the cards.
In it, one of the contributors said the cards were being sent to “random men who we now know have … a higher statistical probability of going out and committing sexual crimes in this country – it is disgusting”. The evidence does not back this up: according to official data on the nationality of people in prison, non-UK citizens are less likely to be incarcerated for sexual crimes than UK nationals.
Regan believes the City of Sanctuary story shows a circular relationship between online influencers and traditional media – from a single Substack, to major newsrooms, and then back to social media. “Once it has that stamp of legitimacy, it travels back into the online ecosystem with far greater force,” said Regan. “Each loop amplifies the last.”
The Telegraph and Daily Mail articles were shared by far-right influencers and organisations including Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, Traditional Britain Group, and Mark Collet, the founder of the white nationalist Patriotic Alternative, among others.
Jihad Watch, a US-based blog which has been labelled a “hate group” by experts and whose founder, Robert Spencer, was banned from entering the UK in 2013, also shared one of the articles. They added a message which said government officials were preparing “British children to welcome their new overlords and accept the Islamization of their nation”. (Again, not true.)
Political figures who once kept their distance from this content are now actively amplifying it, - Jenni Regan, CEO of IMIX, a charity that supports migration sector organisations
Richard Donaldson, a conspiracy theorist who brands himself as a political commentator, spread the misinformation on social media that schools were telling “our daughters, our granddaughters as young as five years old… to pledge their love to foreign fighting age migrants they have never met.” He asked for donations to fund a lawsuit against the charity – although there’s been no legal action taken to date.
At the time, Donaldson was the founder of a group called the Great British National Protest, and Steven Baker, the group’s representative in Northern Ireland, posted a video calling for parents to keep their children out of schools. “Young girls have to write love letters,” he said, falsely, to “fighting age males.” Baker was recently charged by police in Belfast for “riotous assembly” in June’s riots. In court, Baker’s lawyers denied any wrongdoing, according to Irish News. We contacted Baker’s lawyers to get his response on the ‘love letter’ claims, but they did not respond.
We asked Donaldson about his comments, the fact he had asked for money for a legal claim he never brought and whether his position had changed after the Charity Commission decision. He replied: “Print what you wish. Nobody cares.”
“It sounds absolutely bonkers”
I have read and listened to dozens of abusive messages sent to City of Sanctuary. They were a mix of threats, xenophobia and conspiracy theories.
In one voicemail a caller snarled: “How dare – you dirty fucking pedophilic nonces – try and get school children to write to illegal, unvetted, fucking rapist migrants.
“You dirty fucking cunts will pay for this. You dirty pedo nonce fuckers, you’re at the end, motherfuckers. You’re all at the end, you dirty leftist bastards.” None of this is true.
Another message accused the charity of brainwashing children with “repulsive antiwhite Jewish cultural Marxism”, a common far-right conspiracy theory. Someone else talked of a coming revolution and threatened retribution. “You will be held accountable for the charges of terrorism, sedition, murder and rape. Regards you cunts,” they wrote. Another email was simply titled “You’re all going to die”.
Both Donaldson and Gill were among those who posted lists of the schools that were part of the Schools of Sanctuary programme. Neither called for their followers to send abuse to any of the schools, but some on the list ended up being targeted.
Jo Butler, headteacher of Cotham School in Bristol, only became aware of the Valentine’s day activity when she received a letter from Bristol Patriots, a far right group.
In the letter, the group demanded that the school cut ties with City of Sanctuary. It claimed children were being encouraged to write “love letters” and “pledges” and said the activities constituted “the early stages of grooming”.
Bristol Patriots’ protests in the city have been attended by a convicted child sex offender, a former bank robber and self-proclaimed neo-nazis, according to the Bristol Cable and Hope Not Hate. (The group later apologised for “some of the other groups who were invited to the march”, saying they were not aligned with their mission.)
Butler was incensed. “The way it was presented by the Bristol Patriots it sounds absolutely bonkers,” she said.
Her school hadn’t participated in the Valentine’s activity, which was voluntary. But she felt compelled to respond and published a statement accusing Bristol Patriots of spreading misinformation. “To suggest that encouraging empathy toward displaced people constitutes ‘grooming’ represents a profound misunderstanding of both safeguarding and basic human decency,” she wrote.
To suggest that encouraging empathy toward displaced people constitutes ‘grooming’ represents a profound misunderstanding of both safeguarding and basic human decency, - Jo Butler, headteacher of Cotham School in Bristol
The school never heard from Bristol Patriots again.
Butler said many of her pupils are asylum seekers or from a refugee background. Creating a welcoming environment had been important to the school before it worked with City of Sanctuary, and still is. “We’re really proud of our School of Sanctuary status. We continue to really trumpet it whenever we can. That’s not going to change,” she said.
“We had nothing to lose, that’s how bad it was”
Misinformation around migration is common in the UK media. In 2016, a report by the UN High Commission for Refugees said that the rightwing press in the UK was uniquely hostile towards refugees and immigrants when compared to other European countries.
More recently, a study by the Runnymede Trust found that between 2019 and 2024 the word most commonly associated with the word “immigrants” in the media was “illegal”. Politicians and the press persistently presented migrants as “criminal, deceitful and dangerous,” it said.
This is one of the reasons why later this year, the Bureau will launch a community-led project looking at how hate against migrants and refugees is spread and who profits from it.
In the past year, the industry-led press regulator IPSO upheld nine complaints against British newspapers for inaccurately reporting matters related to migration. Most of these were against The Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.
In other instances, organisations have taken legal action. In 2021, MailOnline and The Times had to settle a libel claim after they falsely accused the Al-Khair Foundation of funding human trafficking and smuggling gangs. In 2022, News Group Newspapers reached a settlement with a law firm after its paper, the Sun, made the false allegation that it was “shamelessly touting a price list to help migrants stay in the UK”.
In 2023, TalkTV published an apology and paid damages and legal costs to Migrants Organise after its presenter Mike Graham falsely said it was funded to “help illegal migration”. After the broadcast, the charity faced a social media pile-on of hundreds of messages.
One post read: “We should be disappearing these types, surely?”. Another said: “send every fucking one of them to Rawanda [sic]”. Things got so bad the charity had to hire security as a precaution for a family picnic it had organised.
Zrinka Bralo, the charity’s CEO, said the experience was stressful, but nothing compared to what she’d been through previously. The former journalist came to the UK as a refugee during the Bosnian genocide. “There were no snipers chasing me, and I didn’t have to drive a bulletproof car,” she said.
And while the decision to fight back had costs in terms of staff time and lawyers, there was no doubt in her mind it was the right thing to do. “We had nothing to lose, that’s how bad it was,” she said. “if we didn’t take them on, they would just continue their harassment.”
Cleared but no coverage
The Telegraph hasn’t covered the fact the Charity Commission cleared the City of Sanctuary of wrongdoing and Gill rejected the findings, saying the regulator was “not fit for purpose”. Gavin Williamson has asked the regulator to review its decision.
Last month, GB News ran another story in which Laura Trott, a Conservative MP, accused the charity of pushing “highly politicised messaging” related to a ‘day of welcome’ where children learn about the experiences of refugees. GB News sent an email to the charity at 8pm giving it two hours to respond.
Like clockwork, the abusive emails followed. One said: “You are a disgrace to the British people. You should all get out of the UK. Nobody wants you trying to brain wash children.”
Summer-Rees says the sustained misinformation and threats have made her lose faith in the media and at times question people’s humanity.
However, it has not dampened her determination. If City of Sanctuary is being continually targeted, they must be doing something right, she said. What really motivates her is witnessing everyday acts of kindness and the ability of refugee families to continue fighting to build their lives in the face of a hostile and precarious environment.
“Their resilience keeps me going. Everything they’ve been through and their ability to still strive to have the best life they can here in the UK,” she said. “I think we are all driven by that.”
World Affairs Correspondent