Migrants crossing the English Channel have been allowed to enter the UK without being subjected to fingerprint or ID checks, and some of them have since vanished from the asylum hotels they were allocated to, The Daily Telegraph reported.
According to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Neal, about two-thirds of the migrants who have disappeared from “secure” hotels did not undergo the required “biometric enrollment” that would have enabled them to be identified and tracked.
This situation, Neal explained, makes things problematic both for the country and for the migrants themselves who are thus left vulnerable to human trafficking and other abuses.
“Put simply, if we don’t have a record of people coming into the country then we do not know who is threatened or who is threatening,” he said.
Neal’s report also mentions that some migrants had knives and weapons on them when they were searched on arrival, and that there were "incidents where migrants still possessed weapons after they had been searched".
Some 28,526 migrants arrived in the UK in 2021 – more than 100 times as many as the 236 who arrived in 2018 – and, as The Daily Telegraph pointed out, at least 15,000 have arrived in the UK so far this year.