Amber Rudd’s Home Office has lost track of some 56,000 migrants who were supposed to be deported, including over 700 criminals.
The situation was exposed by Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration David Bolt, the Telegraph reports.
Bolt, a veteran of MI5, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, and the Serious Organised Crime Agency, noted that of roughly 80,000 foreign nationals scheduled for deportation and required to check in regularly with officials, 55,974 are so-called declared absconders.
This means their “whereabouts are unknown and all mandatory procedures to re-establish contact with the migrant have failed”.
Bolt further noted that there is “little evidence” the authorities are taking any action to locate the vast majority of these individuals.
5,728 of those scheduled for deportation but at large in the community are so-called “Foreign National Offenders”, or FNOs, and they contribute over 700 people to the tally of missing migrants.
Of 9,288 planned removals of FNOs in 2016, fully a third were unsuccessful, with Bolt noting that their removal “is regularly frustrated, often by last-minute legal challenges, and monitoring non-detained FNOs effectively is a challenge and one that raises obvious public protection concerns.”
Bolt offered the authorities responsible for monitoring migrants some sympathy, observing that “the numbers required to report routinely mean that it is extremely difficult for staff at reporting centres to ensure that reporting events are ‘meaningful’, in terms of encouraging voluntary departures or resolving barriers to removal.”
His reports do indicate there may be a somewhat lax attitude towards monitoring, however, noting one case where a foreign criminal missed 19 appointments in a row any before any action was taken.
Despite statements from ministers that Bolt’s findings make for “difficult reading”, this issue is not new in Britain.
Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke was forced to resign after it emerged that some 1,023 foreign criminals who should have been considered for deportation were released from prison and into the community back in 2006 — after heavy criticism from Tory opposition politicians like David Davis, who now sits in Cabinet.
Current Home Secretary Amber Rudd does not seem to have been put under much pressure by current failures, however, with mainstream media coverage of the scandal being fairly minimal.
Similar issues have been observed in other Western and Northern European countries, with reports that Germany has lost track of as many as 30,000 illegal migrants, and Finland admitting it had lost track of 5,300 migrants after the Turku terror killings.
Members of the public are often surprised to discover that migrants scheduled for deportation are left free and not detained pending deportation — especially where criminals are concerned.
This is made very difficult by European Union rules, with Hungary’s attempts to ensure all asylum seekers are detained while their claims are processed being subject to heavy legal and political pressure.