UK needs a tough Australian-style patrol to send back migrants, says former Border Force chief
AN AUSTRALIAN-STYLE border patrol is needed to take migrants back to France, says a former head of the Border Force, as seven more boats were intercepted yesterday.
Tony Smith, a former Border Force director general, said Britain needed a more robust response from enforcement officers with powers of arrest and should be trained to remove migrants from their dinghies and fingerprint them before returning them to France.
Mr Smith, who will be giving evidence today to MPS investigating the Channel crisis, said Border Force cutters and French vessels are currently constrained from such Australian-style tactics under international maritime law that only allows officers to intervene if they are invited to do so.
Unless this “search and rescue” role was changed, the migrants could continue to be shepherded by French boats into UK waters where they could invite the British to save them or, as has happened in some cases, call for help from the British coastguards or police. “We need an Australian-style border patrol comprising officers fully trained and equipped with vessels to board, seize and take on board people and goods on the high seas,” said Mr Smith. “It could sit under the Border Force.”
The proposal came as 70 migrants on up to seven boats were intercepted yesterday, making May a record-breaking month for illegal migrant crossings with nearly 600 people picked up in just three weeks. The number of people being deported from the UK fell to 6,778 – the lowest number since 2004, when records began.
Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is seeking to rewrite laws and the international Dublin agreement to make it easier to return migrants to France. Yesterday she held a virtual meeting with 30 Tory MPS concerned about the surge in Channel migrants.
A Home Office source said France is sympathetic to halting migration: “The French do not want to allow crossings, as this creates a strong pull factor for more migrants to come across continental Europe to northern France in the hope of crossing.”
Mr Smith, who chairs an international border association including the UK Border Force, said a new treaty was needed to allow each country’s border force vessels free range in the other’s waters to pick up migrants and take them back to France.
He said this would kill off the trade by showing attempts to cross only end in failure.
Mr Smith, who headed Canada’s immigration service in the early 2000s, helped pioneer a similar agreement with the US after 9/11, where enforcement teams could cross into each other’s territories to “chase and apprehend” migrants.
‘The French do not want to allow crossings, as this creates a strong pull factor for more migrants to come to northern France’