For a moment, it looked as though the Conservative government’s ‘Rwanda plan’—sending illegal migrants to the African nation for asylum processing—was actually getting somewhere. Having finally managed to get the bill passed into law, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had the first deportation flight pencilled in for July. Officials were even told to start identifying—and possibly detaining—migrants who could be deported.
But then it emerged that thousands of these migrants have effectively gone missing.
The Home Office is in contact with just 38% of those it intends to send to Rwanda, according to a “quietly”-released impact assessment. The document said that of the 5,700 identified for removal, only 2,145 of them “continue to report to the Home Office and can be located for detention.”
Home Office sources told The Times that while the department had previously relied on the offer of free accommodation and weekly cash payments to prevent migrants from absconding, they feared that the threat of deportation would—as the paper put it—“outweigh that.” Which raises the question of what measures officials put in place to prevent expected absconsions—if any. The European Conservative has asked the department for comment on this point.
Without actually addressing the question at hand, a Home Office spokesman told this publication that the government was “entering the final phase of operationalising” this policy, but only “now that the Safety of Rwanda Act has passed and our Treaty with Rwanda [has been] ratified.”
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins told journalists on Tuesday that law enforcement officials would use “a variety of measures to find people,” adding that illegal migrants “will be found and they will be removed.” If the past two years of failure on this policy is anything to go by, it would be fair to call this an empty threat.
The pro-borders Social Democratic Party responded to this news by criticising the government over its “rank incompetence.”
Migrants who are being picked for deportation arrived in the UK illegally—most of them by dangerously crossing the Channel in small boats—between January 2022 and June 2023, meaning those who arrived in the 10 months since will not be on the initial flights to Rwanda. If, indeed, these take off at all.
The government has denied losing track of potential Rwanda deportees. Officials told the BBC that these simply “cannot be immediately located,” instead—in much the same way that someone who doesn’t want to admit to having lost their keys tells their partner they simply can’t remember where they put them.
Ex-border force chief Kevin Saunders told the broadcaster that the Home Office was “telling porkies.”
