Illegal immigrants? Not our problem, say police

WORRIED residents who call 999 over suspicious behaviour and even alleged crimes by illegal migrants are being told it is a matter for Border Force – not the police, a leading MP has told The Mail on Sunday.

The revelation by Natalie Elphicke comes as more than 600 asylum seekers arrived in her constituency in Dover, Kent yesterday.

Residents of the town’s Aycliffe estate – by Shakespeare Beach, a major landing point for illegal migrants – have told the Tory MP they feel abandoned by police.

Ms Elphicke said her constituents have called officers to report suspicious incidents involving migrants, but have been told police will pass on the information to Border Force.

She said the apparent policy was confirmed in a crisis summit she held with force chiefs.

Ms Elphicke said it marked a change from two years ago when police were the first to arrive.

‘The residents told me police told them that they would let Border Force know, not that they will send a car around to look into it,’ she said. ‘They wait for Border Force to do the operation, rather than police dealing with the situation.’

Last night Kent Police sources admitted ‘suspected migrants are a matter for the Border Force and not for police’ but said officers would still ‘assist when needed and resources allow’.

But residents in Aycliffe say they have now become so fearful that they stay in and lock their doors when Border Force helicopters are flying overhead, signalling the arrival of more illegal migrants.

One woman was left so traumatised after her home of 30 years was invaded by a teenage migrant that she has since moved out.

Sue Doyle, 59, was at home three weeks ago when a 16-year-old Albanian slipped in through her back door, and snatched her phone to ring a relative. Terrified, she alerted neighbours who raised the alarm. The youth was detained by Border Force officers.

Ms Elphicke said Kent Police were initially unwilling to investigate the incident as a potential crime. They eventually agreed to visit Ms Doyle and take a statement but advised her not to press charges.

Shocked, she has since moved out to live with her elderly mother.

In another incident on the same road in August, Kerry Jones, 47, saw a migrant barge into her back garden where her six-year-old daughter usually plays. She screamed at him to leave and he screamed back.

Ms Jones then ran to the front garden and dialled 999. But she was told to go inside her home and lock her doors. She said the police never bothered to turn up.

Kent Police said in a statement: ‘Officers work to keep the county a safe place to work and live and if residents are concerned about any criminal activity they should contact Kent Police.’

NOW it seems that the police will not rush to help those near our unguarded South Coast, who are quite reasonably alarmed by the appearance on their property of newly arrived migrants. Sometimes these young men have actually banged on their doors and on one occasion, one walked into a private home and seized its resident’s phone.

The victims of these actions have complained that the police have told them the problem is trespass, and so a ‘civil matter’ and the responsibility of the Border Force.

No doubt many individual police officers in the area are goodhearted and wish they could do more, but their leadership seems incapable of making proper use of their courage and dedication.

Dover and Deal MP Natalie Elphicke has quite rightly expressed alarm, and has urged local police chiefs to respond to residents’ pleas for help and for a proper police presence.

The Mail on Sunday strongly supports her call – but these developments are all too typical of a country in which almost the entire civil structure seems to have given up any serious efforts to control lawless mass migration.

It seems that everybody brought in to assist has ended up helping migrants to come ashore, rather than deterring them from arriving. Even where migrants can be shown to have no lawful right to remain here, courts use human rights law to frustrate attempts at deportation.

There has to be a suspicion that the courts of this country – like the laughably politically correct leaders of our police in their menopause waistcoats – are increasingly politicised and unsympathetic to the idea that our borders must be enforced. Even where this is not so, judges in many cases have no choice but to uphold the appeals of migrants, as generations of political leaders in this country have enacted laws or signed treaties which make it extraordinarily difficult to remove people who have come here illegally.

And then there is the huge and damaging role of the liberal media, most especially the BBC, which laughs at its obligation to be impartial, a duty owed in return for the great heaps of licence-payers’ money it receives each year.

Yet nobody in the world of politics seems ready to enforce this bargain. And so, when our borders give way, and the people smugglers grow rich on their wicked trade, the Left-wing media attack the Government for the resulting chaos in such places as the Manston migrant processing centre in Kent.

Surely the ghastly scenes at Manston are in fact the consequence of years of liberal institutional weakness in defending our coasts. So are the miserable events in and around Dover, where people who have long thought they were safe in their homes and gardens now find that strangers, who have only recently come ashore from unknown places of origin, are actually walking across their lawn and hammering on their doors.

What a contrast this chaos is to the stern, suspicious processing and long queues which the lawabiding UK citizen must undergo to re-enter this country after a holiday. How can a government operating with our existing laws, Civil Service and public broadcasting be expected to cope with this?

In truth, we are lucky that it is not much worse. Yet there is the beginning of hope. The Government of Rishi Sunak has clearly seen that the attitude of France is in fact crucial – that if the migrants can be prevented from putting to sea on the other side of the Channel, then they cannot come here.

The frontier of the United Kingdom is now in fact along the French coast. A determined and successful pursuit of this policy is probably the most important and also the most popular action which the Government can take. A thorough reform of police, courts and the BBC would not go amiss either.