UK Could Send Illegal Migrants to Tiny South Atlantic Island

Successive British governments have struggled to stem the increasing flow of people-trafficking from mainland Europe, which has led to dozens of drownings at sea. Reception centres and hotels are now overloaded.

The British government has revived plans to house illegally-trafficked asylum claimants on a remote South Atlantic island.

Junior Safeguarding Minister Sarah Dines hinted on Monday that former Home Secretary Priti Patel's three-year-old proposal to house asylum seekers on the tiny Ascension Island could be revived if the Supreme Court rejects the government's appeal against lower court rulings that its deal to resettle asylum-seekers in Rwanda was unlawful.

"We look at all possibilities," Dines told a TV interviewer. "This crisis in the Channel is urgent, we need to look at all possibilities and that is what we are doing."

Ascension Island, a British Overseas Territory like the Falkland Islands, is a nine-mile-wide volcanic rock that lies just south of the equator roughly halfway between the eastern tip of Brazil and the mouth of the Congo river.

The island is home to a Royal Air Force base which dwarfs its three hamlets of a combined population of just over 800 people.

Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants have been trafficked to Britain on overloaded and flimsy inflatable boats across the treacherous English Channel and North Sea over the last two years. A shortage of rented housing means they have controversially been accommodated in hotels or military barracks while their claims to political asylum are processed.

The government's interim solution has been to lease the 200-room Bibby Stockholm hotel barge, now docket in Portland harbour in the south-western county of Dorset — despite protests by locals. The vessel could start taking on single male migrants as soon as Monday.

Dines said the barge "sends a forceful message that there will be proper accommodation but not luxurious," adding: "Luxurious hotel accommodation has been part of the pull, I'm afraid."

"There have been promises made abroad by the organized criminal gangs and organizations which have tried to get people into the country unlawfully and they say, 'You will be staying in a very nice hotel in the middle of a town in England'," Dines said. "That needs to stop and the barge is just one of a wide range of other measures."

Later on Monday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tweeted a video in which he insisted his government's policies were working and his pledge to "stop the boats" was on track.

Five things I'm doing to stop the boats👇 pic.twitter.com/X5q2hfUE3X

— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) August 7, 2023