HOUSING activists came together yesterday to support a peaceful protester threatened with deportation despite being a law-abiding citizen of a European Union country.

Hungarian-born Daniel Gardonyi attended his third meeting with the Home Office after being told last month that he was to be removed from Britain as part of Operation Nexus.

The joint programme between the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office aims to deport foreign nationals who have been arrested on suspicion of committing a crime, even if they have not been convicted of it.

Mr Gardonyi was arrested but released without charges during an eviction protest at the Sweets Way estate in north London in September.

After leaving the Home Office interview, the 34-year-old was welcomed by cheers from representatives of many of London’s leading housing and anti-austerity campaigns.

He said: “Every time I come here, they start threatening me with deportation.

“They are not supposed to say why I am here, so the police have to find a way to prove that I am some kind of dangerous maniac terrorist.”

Speaking of being passed back and forth between the procedures of the Home Office and the Met, he said: “One of them wants to remove me from the country, the other wants to keep me in the country for trials. I am losing my patience.”

Occupy London activist Mark Weaver told the Star he had come to support Mr Gardonyi because they had worked together for several years.

He added: “It’s all been in the context of supporting communities to increase the control over their own lives, be it reclaiming libraries that the Tories are trying to cut or protecting estates where people are being forcefully evicted.

“I think he is the sort of person we need in this country at this time.

“I don’t know if the state is hugely concerned about Daniel himself. I think the state is only very, very interested in increasing its own power to remove and to detain and to criminalise whoever it wants, whenever it wants.

“What is happening to Daniel is the same thing that is happening to people in Yarl’s Wood detention centre or Calais — it’s all part of the state’s scheme to try and gain total control over its population.”