by More than 33,000 migrants face deportation to Rwanda if flights take off, Home Office figures revealed on Tuesday.
Some 33,085 asylum claims have been made since Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” legislation became law in July, giving ministers powers to detain any illegal migrant and deport them to a safe third country such as Rwanda.
It means that under the legislation their claims will be declared “inadmissible” and they will face deportation to Rwanda, where they will have to apply for asylum.
The Prime Minister is trying to secure the first deportation flights this spring if he can get his Rwanda bill passed in the House of Commons after the Supreme Court ruled the policy was illegal.
He faces threats of rebellion from both wings of his party over the controversial legislation, which seeks to further restrict immigrants’ rights to bring legal challenges to their deportation and address Supreme Court concerns.
Rwanda’s plan is seen as instrumental in providing a “stop the boats” deterrent. However, even if the flights take off, ministers have acknowledged that the number of deportees will initially be small.
Giving evidence to the Supreme Court, Sir James Eadie, a government lawyer, told judges it would be “limited” at first. The UK has so far committed at least £290m to the five-year deal with Rwanda.
“Both participants recognize the need to build capacity: the UK has provided funding for this, the Rwandan authorities have taken action in terms of recruitment and training, and the numbers are initially low,” Sir James said.
Rwanda has set up initial accommodation at Hope Hostel in Kigali with capacity for 200 migrants, although it is building houses and apartments for asylum seekers and has previously said it can take as many as Britain sends.
The Refugee Council has estimated that Rwanda has the capacity to accept no more than 10,000 migrants a year once the scheme becomes fully operational, which it claims would leave at least 25,000 people a year in limbo.
The figures were revealed in data published by the Home Office following Sunak’s claim to have fulfilled his promise to clear the backlog of more than 90,000 “legacy” asylum cases from before June 2022.
This claim is disputed by Labor and refugee charities who have flagged 4,500 unresolved “complex” cases among the 91,000. These have not yet been decided because the Government says there are outstanding security concerns, disputes over the age of the asylum seeker or unresolved criminal issues.
The data also showed that there are still 98,000 asylum applications pending resolution.
These are in addition to the 91,000 processed and another 20,000 submitted after June 2022 that have been approved, making a total of 112,000.
On Tuesday, Home Secretary James Cleverly admitted it was “impossible” to say how long it would take to resolve these outstanding asylum cases. “The thing is, it’s impossible to say and I’m not going to make predictions,” he told the Today show.
However, he said applications were being processed ten times faster after doubling the number of asylum caseworkers and streamlining bureaucracy. “Last year we processed 112,000 cases, the most in over 20 years, so again you know you can look at the math,” she said.
The figures also show that of the 112,000 “authorized” applications, there were 35,119 cases that were declared invalid, suspended or withdrawn, in which asylum seekers did not respond to interview calls or letters within the specified period and, therefore, Therefore, their requests were rejected. .
This has led to claims that asylum seekers have gone missing or disappeared into the “black economy”. The number of “withdrawn” cases has more than doubled in three years, from nine per cent of claims to a quarter.
Last month, senior Home Office officials admitted to MPs on the Home Affairs committee that they did not know the whereabouts of 17,316 asylum applications whose cases had been withdrawn last year. They later corrected their admission, saying there were records of them, allowing for coercive action.
On Tuesday, Cleverly told the BBC that withdrawn applicants trying to hide on the black market would be tracked, saying: “If they try to enter the illicit economy, for example, we significantly increase raids on illegal workers, so in Ultimately, we find these people.
“We are going to look for places where we know that people work illegally so often in the clothing trade, sometimes in the restaurant trade, in the construction trade, we know where these people go and usually work, often with cash in hand. hand, often undocumented, we go and find them and eliminate them.”
The data also showed that the number of illegal immigrants expelled from the UK has halved in the last seven years, from 40,000 in 2016 to 24,000 last year. This is despite a two-thirds increase in voluntary and forced returns over the past year.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said it was false to claim the “legacy” backlog had been cleared when there were 4,500 “unresolved” cases, 17,000 were “withdrawn”, when the Home Office “had no idea” Where are those people? , and the rest of the pending work had doubled to 99,000.
“Returns of rejected asylum seekers have fallen by 50 per cent compared to the last Labor government. Only five per cent of Albanians who arrived in the UK on small boats have been returned. £400m for the failed Rwanda plan and no one sent it,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“Tricks instead of grappling. Failing to stop criminal gangs undermining border security, eliminating backlogs, ending the use of hotels, implementing returns or properly managing the asylum system. “With a history of failures like that, Rishi Sunak should stop…bragging.”
