Lawyers and migrants’ rights groups took unprecedented steps to protect staff and clients in the wake of threats from far-right groups over the summer, following days of rioting across the UK.

Precautions taken included cancelling drop-in sessions and all face-to-face appointments, shutting offices, removing office addresses and staff names and photos from websites, and contacting clients to warn them against staying in asylum hotels while the disorder continued.

Fears in the immigration sector were heightened in early August after a list of names and locations of migrant organisations was circulated among far-right groups, with the instruction: ‘WEDNESDAY NIGHT LADS … 8PM MASK UP.’

Although these threatened attacks failed to materialise – with anti-racist protestors massively outnumbering any showing by the far right (see photo) – the targeting of migrant support groups sent shockwaves through a sector that is used to hostility. A senior partner at an immigration firm said: ‘That overwhelming sense of fear had taken over. The threat was really palpable, really visceral. This was completely batshit crazy, so there was no way of knowing what on earth to do.’ He described writing to staff advising them to take safety precautions as ‘the most awful email I’ve ever sent. I had a really heavy heart.’

Kaweh Beheshtizadeh, a consultant with Fadiga & Co, personally called all of his clients. ‘I could hear how worried they were, especially as they escaped to this country to be protected,’ he said. ‘It’s very difficult for people from warzone countries, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, to understand that there are people here who would attack them and burn down their hotels. It is just beyond belief that there are people who feel it is right to attack law firms and attack lawyers because we are representing then.’

Although the day of the threatened attacks passed off largely peacefully, there were still some heart-stopping moments. One solicitor recalled: ‘I had a call at about five minutes to 5 pm from “Andrew at the Home Office”. I thought, “Oh, I know. Here we go.”’ As it turned out, it really was Andrew from the Home Office wanting to talk about a case, and the two had a more amiable than usual conversation.

Those who work in the immigration sector have grown used to their clients being targeted, but events this summer left many fearing for their own safety and that of their families. An advocacy officer said she was worried not just for her clients but ‘also for my grandma. I needed to make sure my own house was okay.’ Colleagues felt the same: ‘There is one who is also Muslim and she wears the headscarf, so that’s a much more identifying factor of her religion. We were discussing in the group chat how scary this must be for our clients, and she said: “But I’m really scared as well and I don’t know what to do.”’

She added: ‘For our Black and brown colleagues, it definitely felt a lot more because there was the duality of the situation. We are supporting people who are scared but I am also scared. It’s difficult to comfort someone when you are feeling fear for yourself.’

A solicitor who has a white spouse and mixed heritage children said: ‘For the first time, I felt as if, my god, I’ve made them targets. In a sense, I didn’t really mind if the far right had come to duff me up, but I was really worried about my children and those around me.’

Organisations described having to make judgements that would previously have been unthinkable to try to keep staff safe. The advocacy officer said: ‘We wanted to still have employees at the drop-in centre, just in case anyone didn’t see our messages that it was closed. We decided it would be safest to have two of my white colleagues, rather than a brown person like myself, who would be more of a target if someone did turn up to cause trouble.’

Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit is one of several organisations that hopes the attacks on asylum hotels will hasten the scrapping of this form of accommodation, which makes them easy targets for the far right. Its director, Denise McDowell, said: ‘The hotels have become quite symbolic. Hotels imply luxury and that’s where the resentment comes from. Whereas the experience of those who live in them is quite the opposite of that. Poor-quality food, no ability to make choices about how you live, who you share your room space with. People should be housed in the community, where they have a better standard of life and are much harder to target.’

Tori Sicher, an immigration solicitor at Bhatt Murphy, said the episode has revealed to a wider audience the hostility experienced by those working in migrants’ rights. ‘I had a lot of people who don’t work in the field, friends, contact me to make sure I’m okay and to say that they were concerned for me.’

In a show of support, a non-lawyer friend of one solicitor asked if they could work in the firm’s office on the day the attacks were expected, ‘just for solidarity’. The gesture ‘almost moved me to tears. Emotions were running quite high.’

Like many, Beheshtizadeh blames political and media rhetoric for emboldening racists. A former asylum-seeker himself, he spoke of his relief that the disorder happened under Keir Starmer’s government: ‘The response was what you would expect from a competent government. I say this as a Liberal Democrat.’ He had felt able to reassure frightened clients: ‘We have the right person as prime minister, with previous experience of dealing with riots as head of the Crown Prosecution Service.’

Behehstizadeh said some practitioners are now questioning if they can continue in the work: ‘I have had that conversation with people, whether they should continue in this job or go into another area of law.’

By contrast the advocacy officer, who described herself as ‘very new’ to the immigration sector, said it has had the opposite effect, despite having been ‘in a state of shock and panic’. ‘I know why I came into this work, and it was to help people who look like me, look like my family,’ she explained. ‘I always just put it back to that. If it was my family in danger, would I give up at the first hurdle. If anything, it has strengthened the need for me to push the word out more across the board.’