Small-boat migrants face ‘rapid removal’
CHANNEL migrants will face an automatic ban on making asylum claims under tough new immigration measures being drawn up by Suella Braverman, the Daily Mail can reveal.
The Home Secretary will change the law so every migrant who has passed through a safe country – such as France – will instantly see applications for refugee status declared void. They will then face ‘rapid removal’ from Britain.
It will tighten rules introduced last year which granted new arrivals a grace period of up to six months.
Swiftly declaring each migrant’s case inadmissible will allow them to be detained and then removed from Britain, sources indicated. The new legislation will also set out further measures to tackle ‘spurious asylum claims’, it is understood.
The legal changes will form a key plank of efforts to fulfil Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the boats’.
Last year, a record 45,728 migrants arrived from northern France in 1,104 boats, dwarfing 2021’s total of 28,526.
The Home Secretary revealed before Christmas that housing asylum seekers will cost the taxpayer £3.5 billion this financial year, up from £2.1 billion in the previous 12 months. Last month Mr Sunak vowed to toughen immigration laws so that all migrants who arrive by irregular routes – such as small boats – will be ‘detained and swiftly returned’ to their homeland or a third country.
Mr Sunak last night promised Britain he would ‘not let you down’ in tackling illegal migration in his first party political broadcast as Prime Minister. He said: ‘We’re introducing new laws that make it unambiguously clear that if you come to our country illegally, you will not have the right to stay and will be removed.’
The chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, warned last week that the UK’s immigration detention centres did not have capacity for Mr Sunak’s plan to detain every small-boat migrant. The Government has announced plans to reopen disused centres Campsfield House, near Oxford, and Haslar, at Gosport, Hampshire. Bids for the £450 million, six-year contracts closed yesterday. The centres are due to be up and running by August and will hold an additional 1,000 detainees in total.
Mr Sunak’s five-point plan to address the Channel crisis is likely to lock the Government in a bruising contest with human rights activists.
They will almost certainly claim the inadmissibility measures breach international refugee conventions. It remains unclear what steps the Government will take to stop deportations being frustrated by last-minute legal challenges on human rights and modern slavery grounds.