17 crimes of migrant we can’t deport
A FAILED asylum seeker with convictions for 17 crimes over seven years has been freed to prowl the streets because he cannot be kicked out of Britain.
The 31-year- old career criminal whose offences include violence and drugs is said to pose a high risk of harm to the public.
But he has been told he can stay because no other country will have him, the High Court heard.
The paranoid schizophrenic had sought compensation from the Government claiming he was unlawfully held in a detention centre. Judge Martin McKenna dismissed the compensation claim. However, the unnamed man has been released from immigration detention after deportation attempts failed.
Instead of being locked up until he can be thrown out he is now at risk of absconding and potentially putting the public in danger.
The man, who was born in a refugee camp in southern Algeria, claimed he was stateless. He entered the UK in 2003 and claimed asylum but this was rejected. Between April 2005 and September 2012 he picked up 14 convic- tions for 17 separate offences including attempted robbery, drug offences and shoplifting. In August 2013 he was convicted of criminal damage and affray and held at an immigration detention centre while Home Office staff tried to deport him.
Bureaucrats spent months trying to acquire travel documents from Western Sahara so the man could return to his family’s home country which they had fled because of war in the 1980s.
But in a communications blunder it emerged the Foreign Office does not recognise Western Sahara as a state so the Government could not accept any documents issued.
Although the compensation claim was dismissed the judge said the man had been unlawfully detained between January and November 2015 when it was clear the Home Secretary would not be able to remove him within a reasonable time. The Home Office said he had been held because he was a serial absconder and there had been a prospect of deportation.
Earlier this summer MPs on the home affairs committee criticised the Government for failing to deport the equivalent of a ‘small town’ of 5,789 offenders from overseas who were walking the UK’s streets – the highest number since 2012.
‘A serial absconder’