Home Secretary Suella Braverman has refused to rule out fitting illegal migrants with electronic and GPS tags.
Her department is reportedly mulling the idea as a way to ensure that migrants awaiting asylum decisions—and who cannot be housed in the network of immigration detention centers around the country—do not pick up and leave unmonitored.
Speaking to Sky News on Monday, August 28th, Suella Braverman did not deny that the Home Office was considering the move:
We have just enacted a landmark piece of legislation in the form of our Illegal Migration Act. That empowers us to detain those who arrive here illegally and thereafter to swiftly remove them to a safe country like Rwanda.
“We need to exercise a level of control of people if we are to remove them from the United Kingdom,” she continued, adding that “a range of options” to achieve this were being considered.
On Sunday, August 27th, a Home Office source told The Times that the department had been asked to do a “deep dive” into how to keep track of migrants, with other options under consideration including making financial support dependent on them regularly reporting to officials.
While the use of electronic and GPS tagging is being considered, the costs associated with it have reportedly raised concerns within the department.
“Tagging has always been something that the Home Office has been keen on and is the preferred option to withdrawing financial support, which would be legally difficult as migrants would be at risk of being left destitute,” a second Home Office source told the paper.
For now, the Home Office’s main focus remains on expanding detention capacity across the UK, with reports that the Home Office is considering reopening centers in Hampshire and Oxfordshire to provide capacity for an additional 290 people.
Ms. Braverman told the House of Commons earlier this year that she was focused on pursuing “a programme of increasing immigration-detention capacity,” including using RAF bases and barges.
The first barge to house asylum seekers, the Bibby Stockholm, received its first occupants earlier this month but has since remained vacant after an outbreak of legionella onboard.
The floating facility was expected to eventually host around 500 men at a time.
Plans to send illegal migrants to Rwanda have also faced hurdles after they were ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court in June, a decision that the Tory-led government is appealing.
