Rwanda migrants set to be detained within days

Migrants could be detained within days as Rishi Sunak seeks to get the first deportation flights off to Rwanda by July.

On Monday, the Prime Minister said flights to Rwanda would take off in 10 to 12 weeks after admitting parliamentary delays meant he would miss his previous spring deadline.

Officials said migrant deportations would begin as soon as Mr Sunak’s Rwanda Bill gained Royal Assent and the new treaty with Rwanda was ratified – expected to happen this week.

Migrants earmarked for deportation are expected to be held in immigration detention centres so their claims and appeals can be processed before they are issued with their removal orders.

The number of detention places for migrants earmarked to be sent to Rwanda has been increased to 2,200 – more than double the amount officials had planned a year ago.

The Safety of Rwanda Bill finally cleared Parliament on Monday night after peers backed down following nearly eight hours of debate.

The legislation paves the way for deportation flights by declaring Rwanda safe for asylum seekers, restricting their rights to legal challenges to deportation and giving ministers powers to ignore injunctions by the European Court of Human Rights trying to ground the planes.

A government source said: “As soon as the treaty is ratified and we have got Royal Assent, we will start getting people ready – and that includes detention.”

The law will allow the Home Office to use powers to hold migrants as long as there is “reasonable prospect” of removing them within a “reasonable timeframe”. Officials said migrants could be detained without prior written notice to counter the risk of them absconding.

There will be 200 trained case workers, 150 immigration judges and 25 courtrooms with capacity to provide more than 5,000 sitting days ready to deal with any legal claims from migrants trying to prevent their deportations.

Commercial charter planes have been booked for specific slots, and an airfield has been put on standby for the first deportations.

Speaking at a Downing Street press conference detailing the preparations, Mr Sunak pledged that there would be a regular “drumbeat” of multiple flights every month through the summer “and beyond” once the Rwanda scheme was operational.

He admitted the flights would take off “later than we wanted”, blaming the delay on Labour and opponents in the Lords for “using every trick in the book” to block them.

The Prime Minister said: “Enough is enough. No more prevarication. No more delay. Parliament will sit there tonight and vote, no matter how late it goes. No ifs, no buts – these flights are going to Rwanda.

“We’re going to deliver this indispensable deterrent so that we finally break the business model of the criminal gangs and save lives.”

His comments came as Home Office figures showed that the number of migrants arriving by small boats across the Channel had increased by 24 per cent to 6,265 in the first four months of this year. The number in the same period last year was 5,049.

Mr Sunak said the Rwanda scheme could act as a deterrent to people seeking to reach the UK on small boats if they knew they could end up being sent to east Africa rather than being allowed to remain in Britain.

“We can’t keep playing this whack-a-mole strategy, dealing with it in a piecemeal fashion,” he said. “You need a systematic deterrent – that’s why the Rwanda scheme is so important.”

Britain has signed up to pay £370 million to Rwanda over five years even if no migrant is deported, according to the National Audit Office. The UK will also pay £150,874 per migrant.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said the Government “could have passed the Bill a month ago if they had scheduled it then – but, as we know, Rishi Sunak always looks for someone else to blame”.

She added: “This is costing the taxpayer half a billion pounds for a scheme that will only cover one per cent of asylum seekers.”

Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, said the Rwanda Bill was unlikely to stop the boats because it was “fatally flawed” and still vulnerable to last-minute challenges by the European Court of Human Rights. She said the only way to escape the court’s jurisdiction was to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Refugee Council said the Rwanda plan was unlikely to work as a deterrent, describing it as something that will “only compound the chaos within our asylum system, all at an exorbitant cost to taxpayers”.

Enver Solomon, the chief executive, said: “Even if, as the Prime Minister asserts, there is to be ‘a regular rhythm of multiple flights every month’, this will still only correspond to at most a few thousand people a year out of tens of thousands.

“Instead of giving these people a fair hearing on UK soil to determine if they have a protection need, the Government will have to look after them indefinitely at considerable cost.”