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Home Office enforcement teams began detaining asylum seekers awaiting deportation to Rwanda in a “large-scale operation” across the UK on Wednesday.
The department released a video sequence
“Our dedicated enforcement teams are working diligently to quickly arrest those who have no right to be here so we can launch flights,” Home Secretary James Cleverly said in a statement.
Rishi Sunak hopes the introduction of his flagship policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda will deter migrants from crossing the Channel to Britain after two years in which operations have been bogged down by legal and parliamentary battles. The Prime Minister has made “stopping the boats” one of five election promises to voters.
According to the Interior Ministry, around 759 people have made the dangerous journey since Friday, with the total number of people crossing the border already topping 7,500 in the first four months of this year, ahead of 2022 records.
The first detentions under Rwanda’s as-yet-untested asylum program come in a difficult week for Sunak, with his Conservative party expected to suffer heavy losses in local elections in England and Wales on Thursday.
Officials declined to give details of the operation, which they described as “large-scale”, or the number of people initially involved, but said arrests had been made across the UK.
Sunak said last month that the first flights carrying asylum seekers to Kigali would depart in July, months after he initially promised and after the passage of the Rwanda security law.
The controversial law designated Rwanda as a safe country for asylum seekers, in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling last year and to limit scope for future legal challenges.
The Interior Ministry said it has increased immigration detention capacity to more than 2,200 places to house those facing deportation to Rwanda. The department also trained 200 new clerks to quickly process claims and kept 500 escorts on hand to force people to board planes.
Commercial charter flights have been booked and an airport has been prepared for the first flights, it said.
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council charity, said the start of detentions had caused “fear, distress and great concern for men, women and children who have fled war and persecution to seek safety in the UK”.
“Children have sent messages to our staff because they fear they are at risk of deportation to Rwanda due to their controversial age status. We have also seen a deterioration in the mental health and wellbeing of the people we work with in the asylum system,” he added.
Labor shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock pointed to government figures that suggest the Home Office is only in contact with 38 percent of the asylum seekers it plans to deport to Rwanda.
Downing Street said it was “incorrect” to say the Home Office was unable to find the rest of the 5,700 asylum seekers it had identified for the first flights.
Questions remain over Labour’s immigration strategy, including how the main opposition party would deal with the tens of thousands of migrants living in limbo in the UK who are considered excluded from the asylum system under current government policy.
Labor has said it would speed up processing but has not confirmed whether it would grant these people asylum seeker status.
On Wednesday, a Labor spokesman confirmed that while the party would block any further deportation flights to Rwanda if it came to power, it would not bring back to Britain asylum seekers already sent there by Sunak’s government until the general election .
This does not mean Labor views Rwanda as a safe country to send asylum seekers, the spokesman added.