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The Home Office will launch a UK-wide operation on Monday to detain asylum seekers in preparation to remove them to Rwanda.
A government official on Sunday confirmed the plan, which had been expected to start some weeks later after UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned last Monday that it would take 10-12 weeks for the first removal flights to Kigali to commence.
Sunak is facing a tough week as his party braces for potentially devastating losses in the local and mayoral elections taking place on Thursday.
The two-week exercise, first reported in the Guardian, will involve holding asylum seekers who arrive at immigration service offices for scheduled meetings.
Other individuals will be selected for removal throughout the country, with all asylum seekers identified for removal transferred to detention centres ahead of flights to Rwanda taking off.
Tory insiders dismissed suggestions that the detention operation was being expedited to give the party a boost ahead of the upcoming local elections.
The Home Office declined to confirm the start of the exercise, but acknowledged that the government was “entering the final phase of operationalising this landmark policy to tackle illegal migration and stop the boats” following the Safety of Rwanda Act becoming law and the ratification of the new UK-Rwanda treaty in recent days.
“At some stage, inevitably, this will include detaining people in preparation for the first flight, which is set to take off to Rwanda in 10-12 weeks,” the Home Office said.
The decision has sparked an angry response from campaigners. Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said ministers were “determined to recklessly pursue its inhumane Rwanda plan despite the cost, chaos and human misery it will unleash”, warning that the policy could spark a “catastrophic system meltdown”.
On Sunday, Labour highlighted Home Office figures showing that 2024 was the first year since records began in 2018 that more than 7,000 people had arrived to the UK by small boats before the end of April. Shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said it was proof Sunak’s “plan is not working”.
Earlier, however, Sunak claimed a rise in asylum seekers heading to Ireland showed that the UK government’s Rwanda migration policy was “already having an impact” as a deterrent.
The prime minister told Sky News that an increase in arrivals in Ireland suggested “people are worried about coming here” to Britain thanks to his flagship removals scheme.
He spoke out after Micheál Martin, Ireland’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister, said last week that asylum seekers were pursuing “sanctuary here and within the European Union as opposed to the potential of being deported to Rwanda”.
Helen McEntee, Ireland’s justice minister, has said more than 80 per cent of asylum seekers enter the country through Northern Ireland. There is no physical land border on the island of Ireland, which Dublin pushed hard to maintain during Brexit negotiations in order not to imperil Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace deal.
Immigration has become a flashpoint issue in Ireland — where a general election is due by early next year. New Taoiseach Simon Harris is also facing pressure to deal with a tent city in central Dublin, where some of the 1,758 asylum seekers for whom the government has been unable to provide accommodation are camped out.
James Cleverly, UK home secretary, and McEntee will discuss the issue on Monday on the sidelines of a British-Irish conference in London.
McEntee will also bring emergency legislation to the Irish cabinet on Tuesday with a legal fix to enable asylum seekers to be returned to Britain.
A government official warned that the UK did not intend to comply with such returns, saying: “We won’t accept any asylum returns from the EU via Ireland until the EU accepts that we can send them back to France.”
The Irish High Court ruled last month that the government’s designation of the UK as a “safe third country” where asylum seekers could be returned was unlawful.
Ahead of the local elections, Chris Philp, policing minister, admitted that public sentiment was not favourable to the Conservatives. “Clearly, at the moment, people do feel grumpy with the government,” he told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
He insisted, however, voters would not consider the poll a “referendum on grumpiness” but “a choice — who do you want to run the country?” Sunak on Sunday declined to rule out a July general election.
