Checks at Border as migrant controls ramped up

● Deportations to rise sharply ● 50 people stopped from entering

An Garda Síochána has ramped up its response to the upsurge in international protection applications in Ireland by scaling up immigration checks close to the Border and preparing for a sharp increase in enforcing deportations, the Sunday Independent can reveal.

Operation Sonnet, the joint policing initiative between the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) and the PSNI, held three days of action on the main Belfast to Dublin road last week and stopped 50 people without valid documents from entering the country.

The high-profile mobile patrols will now be conducted “weekly” in addition to the regular immigration checks conducted by officers assigned to all garda divisions.

Separately, a new policing initiative, Operation Fern, has been launched by the GNIB to meet in excess of 2,000 deportation orders expected to be issued by the Department of Justice by the end of the year.

The GNIB is also planning “targeted” intelligence-based operations aimed at intercepting new routes into the country.

The new garda initiatives follow the hardening of the Government’s position on immigration ahead of the European and local elections and in the wake of record numbers applying for international protection here in the first months of this year.

Most applicants are believed to be travelling to Ireland from the UK via the Irish Border.

In an interview with the Sunday Independent, Aidan Minnock, the chief superintendent at GNIB, said gardaí will be redeployed to operational policing initiatives aimed at detecting and enforcing breaches of immigration laws, including deportations.

He said this is possible because the Department of Justice is taking over immigration registration roles from gardaí, releasing up to 100 officers for frontline roles.

Mr Minnock revealed that the GNIB launched Operation Fern this month to respond to the “escalation in deportation orders” issued by the Justice Minister.

He said he anticipates that in excess of 2,000 deportation orders at least will be issued this year.

“We expect there would be considered escalation in the number of deportation orders issued, which hasn’t been there traditionally, and that we will have to escalate resources to match that,” he said.

He added that the GNIB has executed 44 deportation orders so far this year, along with nine “removal orders” of convicted offenders to another EU country, as well as three “transfer orders” of people to another jurisdiction.

Operation Sonnet, a longstanding joint policing operation with Northern Ireland to police immigration abuses in the Common Travel area, held 11 days of action last year, compared with 12 in the first five months of this year.

Voluntary returns are increasing right across Europe

Gardaí will return people who have no right to be here, despite pushback earlier this year by UK, writes Maeve Sheehan

The man seemed anxious as he clambered down the steps of the bus on the hard shoulder of the M1 at Ravensdale, just north of Dundalk, Co Louth. He was young, perhaps in his 20s, dressed in dark jeans and a jacket, with a canvas holdall slung over his shoulder.

He put his bag on the dusty roadside and stood with his back to the garda van where he would shortly be detained, answering question.

The Belfast to Dublin bus he was travelling on was the seventh coach flagged down on Friday morning by the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) on the third day of immigration action south of the Border.

Gardaí in uniform and hi-vis jackets stepped aboard, walking down the aisle, asking passengers questions such as where they were going and where they had come from. This young man was the only passenger who had been asked to step off the bus.

A garda led him around to the side of the van, a mobile detention centre equipped with 14 holding cells, a desk and a laptop linked to policing networks. The doors of the bus from Belfast whistled shut and it took off for Dublin without him.

It turned out he was travelling to Dublin from the UK without a valid visa. Gardaí locked him in one of the holding cells furnished with a hard grey seat and a window.

He was the second detainee that morning. Another non-EU national on an earlier bus en route to Dublin was detained for not having a visa to enter the country and the computer showed he had already claimed asylum in the UK.

The holding cells are tiny. When one of the men needed to urinate, gardaí escorted him off the van and down a laneway, shielded from passing motorists by trees.

The men would only be held there for a matter of hours, gardaí said. The mobile patrols were timed to coincide with the ferries and flights into Belfast.

By lunchtime, the buses ferrying passengers who had travelled from the UK over the border would have thinned out and the GNIB unit moved on to the next stage of its work. Having been “refused leave to land”, the two detainees would now have to be “removed from the State”.

The garda team were preparing to leave Ravensdale around lunchtime, allowing enough time to catch an afternoon ferry to Holyhead.

By the time the mobile immigration patrol wrapped up, five people had been detained for not having the required paperwork: one man from Afghanistan; two Jordanian males; a Nigerian man and a woman.

They were driven to Dublin Port, taken to a garda station on site, provided with food and refreshments while their details were processed, tickets booked and the UK authorities alerted to expect them.

Gardaí from the same unit that had been on the roadside all morning boarded the ferry with the detainees, escorting them across the Irish Sea and into the waiting hands of immigration officials at Holyhead, before catching the next ferry back.

The previous day, eight gardaí had travelled on a ferry to Holyhead with 14 people refused leave to remain in Ireland. They included a family of seven who had come from Jordan — four children and three adults laden down with luggage and suitcases. They flew to the UK, from there to Belfast and hoped to travel by bus to Dublin on Thursday. Instead, they found themselves driven to Dublin Port — in a civilian car, not the garda van — booked into cabins and escorted back to the UK.

Over three days of immigration checks, 50 people who crossed the Border into Ireland were found to have invalid documents or no documents and were returned to the UK under Operation Sonnet.

The joint operation with British authorities aims to police breaches of immigration law by people crossing the Common Travel Area between the UK and Ireland. The operation has been deployed over many years at different intervals to monitor the Border.

However, according to Aidan Minnock, the chief superintendent at GNIB, Sonnet is now being deployed weekly as part of An Garda Síochána’s response to the upsurge of migrants crossing the Border from the North.

The 50 people refused leave to remain in Ireland who were at Ravensdale last week accounted for nearly half the 107 people stopped after crossing the Border between last October and May 20.

The figures seem a drop in the ocean compared with the estimated 600 international protection applicants believed to travelling across the Border every week.

Asylum applicants surged by 75pc in the first three months of this year, and numbers may increase further when the British government starts sending illegal migrants to Rwanda. An added complication is a recent High Court judgment in Belfast that effectively says the Rwandan rule will not apply in Northern Ireland.

The Border is now the most used route into Ireland.

Justice Minister Helen McEntee told the Cabinet that 91pc of people applying for international protection are applying directly to the Dublin office, circumventing the main ports of entry and suggesting they may have travelled into the Republic across the Border.

Operation Sonnet has been ramped up accordingly, Mr Minnock said, with 12 days of action so far this year compared with 11 for the whole of last year.

The increase is in part possible because of the Department for Justice taking over the administrative registration roles from gardaí, a move that will free up an estimated 100 garda officers for operational duties by year’s end.

“The release of these officers will allow the expansion of Garda National Immigration Bureau operations and deployments,” Mr Minnock said.

Monitoring illegal migrants along the 500km land border — in the Common Travel Area between Ireland and the UK — is a diplomatic headache.

In the recent row over Ireland returning illegal migrants to Britain, British prime minister Rishi Sunak called for no disruption or checkpoints near the Border.

But the reality is the PSNI and GNIB have been working closely together on cross-border crime, including breaches of immigration law for years.

“We are trying to protect the integrity of the Common Travel Area, but also trying to make sure that people are not abusing the immigration system in breach of the law,” Mr Minnock said.

“We remove people from the State who enter illegally and have been refused leave to land. So, in other words, they are in breach of the Immigration Act. They don’t have the correct documentation or visas to enter the State.”

Those seeking international protection are allowed to continue their journey to the International Protection Office in Dublin.

The route into Ireland is fraught with shadowy facilitators, the low- to midlevel figures in the people trafficking chain who charge a fee to ‘smooth’ the migrant path.

Routes and methods of transport are continuously changing, Mr Minnock said, adding: “It goes from taxis to rental cars to buses to trains. It continuously shifts. They’re very agile and it’s organised.”

Trends shift quickly, too. Mr Minnock gave as an example an influx of people travelling from Georgia to Dublin Airport and seeking asylum here. Many were single males travelling on false documents, generally with a “facilitator”.

These GNIB detections in turn resulted in 23 prosecutions of facilitators in different countries. One of the results of that operation has been a notable decline this year in numbers travelling here from Georgia.

A third of people seeking international protection here in the first three months of this year travelled from Nigeria, but according to immigration officers, people of that nationality are stopped on the M1 far less than people of other non-European nationality.

This suggests facilitators are using a different route.

The GNIB and the PSNI share intelligence to detect new routes, and immigration officers are attuned to picking up on unusual traffic at remote crossings.

“We have some very targeted operations that we foresee in the near future based on, I suppose, recent intelligence,” Mr Minnock said, but declined to disclose details for operational reasons.

Human rights groups have raised concerns about alleged racial profiling by gardaí, citing among its examples “discriminatory” immigration checks during cross-border travel.

“We are very conscious of it, we have to be,” Mr Minnock said. Immigration officers are professionally trained to use their judgment objectively.

One of the main deployments of gardaí released from administration duties taken over by the Department of Justice will be in deporting back to their countries of origin those people who have been refused permission to remain.

The rate of deportations — which has been widely criticised by opposition politicians — will be significantly scaled up this year.

Mr Minnock said the GNIB launched Operation Fern this month to respond to the “escalation in deportation orders” issued by the justice minister. He said he expected 2,000 deportation orders would be issued this year “at least”.

“We expect there would be considered escalation in the number of deportation orders issued, which hasn’t been there traditionally and which we will have to escalate resources to match that,” he added.

So far this year, the GNIB has carried out 44 deportation orders, nine “removal orders” of convicted offenders to another EU country and three “transfer orders” of people to another jurisdiction, according to figures released to the Sunday Independent.

But in a recent parliamentary question, Ms McEntee said 284 deportation orders were issued by her department this year and more than 800 were issued last year.

However, it appears some of those deportation orders have only recently reached the GNIB. According to Mr Minnock, many factors could delay enforcement.

The GNIB routinely checks with the department, first to ensure subjects are “good to go” and that their circumstances have not changed, such as family issues or illness. Deportation orders are routinely appealed. Some potential deportees abscond while others move to other jurisdictions. Still others leave voluntarily because a deportation order means the failed applicant’s welfare benefits automatically stop.

According to Mr Minnock, this is what international agencies increasingly want to see.

“Voluntary returns are increasing right across Europe,” he said. “It is the number one priority of Frontex, the EU border management agency, at the moment.

“It’s the biggest and easiest means of returning people to the jurisdiction of origin. I’m only just back from a meeting of Frontex and that’s their main priority.”