The UK's deportation problem

Melanie Phillips:

Even by the jaw-dropping standards of government incompetence to which we have sadly become so accustomed, this one surely takes the humdinging biscuit.

The Home Office, it turns out, has managed to lose 916 prisoners during the past seven years. These were foreign nationals who should have been considered for deportation after serving their sentences. Not only were they not so considered, but the Home Office hasn’t the faintest clue where they have gone.

This debacle occurred, we are told, because the prison service was ‘not focused upon the nationality of its prisoners’; while the immigration department, it appears, simply wasn’t focused at all. So 1023 prisoners slipped through the gap and, with the exception of 107 who have been tracked down, just melted away.

They included no fewer than three murderers, nine rapists, five paedophiles, two convicted of manslaughter, 20 drug importers and others convicted of a variety of violent and other serious offences.

The gravity of their crimes and the consequent risk they posed to the public were such that, as manifest undesirables, they should have been at least considered for deportation. Indeed, 160 of them had committed such serious crimes that the courts had specifically recommended that they should be thrown out of the country at the end of their sentences.

Instead, the Home Secretary archly conceded that he could not say ‘hand on heart’ that they would all be tracked down ‘but we are working on that very energetically’.

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The non gallows humor from the Home Office. The US does have a system for deporting illegal aliens once they have served their sentence. Another good outcome from the unpleasntness in 1776.