The first cohort of illegal migrants set to be returned to France from Britain remained in the United Kingdom on Monday after a series of last-minute legal challenges.
The first deportation flight of Sir Keir Starmer’s vaunted plan to get the border crisis under control flew without a single migrant onboard on Monday because of ‘human rights’ legal claims.
Illegals were removed from the first round of deportation flights to France on Monday, in a troubling start to the so-called “one in, one out” deal negotiated between London and Paris, in which illegal boat migrants who cross the English Channel will be returned to France in exchange for migrants with alleged claims of asylum in the UK.
According to The Times of London, several migrants escaped removal on Monday evening after open borders activist attorneys made last-minute legal challenges on supposed human rights grounds.
The paper reported that at least one of the migrants argued that their history of human trafficking and torture should prevent them from being sent back to France, a first-world European Union nation.
The Telegraph noted that the Home Office — the governmental department responsible for deportations — must provide “generous” extensions to migrants seeking legal advice to block their removal as a result of the ruling against the previous Conservative government’s scheme to send illegals to asylum centres in Rwanda, which itself was derailed by the European Court on Human Rights (ECHR) just hours before the first removal flight was set to take off.
Britain’s highest-polling political faction, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, says it would immediately leave the ECHR upon taking power to prevent this from happening in the future, as it is shown the UK’s membership of the court derails any and all attempts to have a national border. The legacy parties, meanwhile, speak the language of border control but absolutely rule out leaving the court that would make it possible.
In addition to the legal challenges that grounded the deportees this week, leftist activist groups in France and Britain also waged campaigns to disrupt deportations, including by flooding Air France with phone calls, emails, and social media messages urging the airline to refuse cooperation with the French government.
The Auberge des Migrants (Migrants Inn) charity, which aids migrants in Northern France, took responsibility for the strategy in a statement: “There were a lot of people who responded to this campaign and agreed to send emails asking for this collaboration with the Government to be stopped.”
The chaotic start to the scheme may not bode well for its longevity, with the French Ministry of the Interior suggesting that it is willing to scrap the deal if it becomes too burdensome. A ministry source was quoted as saying by the AFP: “We may terminate the agreement if we do not find it satisfactory.”
The Interior Ministry also said that they only expect to accept at most a few dozen illegals from Britain this week, noting the “very experimental nature of this deal”.
While France reportedly pushed for larger-scale deportation flights, the British government is said to prefer small batches of removals, with five or fewer individuals per private flight. Downing Street is reportedly concerned that any more migrants could potentially create security concerns, as well as logistical issues with booking flights, given the propensity for last-minute legal challenges to be waged.
This would pale in comparison to the hundreds to thousands that typically arrive illegally every week across the English Channel on people smuggler-operated small boats from the beaches of France.
Indeed, since London and Paris agreed to the framework in July, some 5,590 illegals have reached British shores from France. It comes as over 31,000 boat migrants successfully crossed the Channel since the start of the year, a record-setting pace set under the left-wing Labour government of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party government.
Junior government minister Alex Davies-Jones was dispatched by the Labour government to play defence on Tuesday morning, speaking to London broadcaster LBC to say the government wants to deport migrants on the one-in-one-out agreement with France “as soon as we physically can”, but admitted she was unable to say when this could actually happen.
She said: “we will be doing so as soon as we physically can. And we need to make sure that it is legally watertight”.
Recently installed Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has vowed to take a hardline approach to stop illegal immigration, including reforming judicial guidance to prevent lawyers from using the European Convention on Human Rights to launch appeals against deportations. However, the left-wing government continues to refuse to withdraw from the agreement as has been advocated by Nigel Farage’s poll-topping Reform UK party.
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