Ireland returns illegal migrants to Britain.

 

The Tory government have squandered £310m of British taxpayers' money on its failed Rwanda scheme. Rishi Sunak has now said that there will be no flights to Rwanda before the General Election on 4 July. Labour have said that if they get elected, they will scrap the Rwanda scheme.

The Tory government claim that the Rwanda scheme is deterring illegal migrants from coming to Britain. It seems that some refugees have been going to the Republic of Ireland which is in the E.U. because of the threat of being deported to Rwanda.

Until recently, the Irish government didn't consider Britain a safe country for asylum seekers because of the Rwanda scheme. It has now reversed this and considers Britain a safe country, because migrants have been flooding into Ireland from the UK. Irish police were stopping busses travelling to Ireland from Belfast to Dublin in October and February, to do immigration checks.

Although Rishi Sunak said he wasn't interested in a return deal with Ireland because France and the E.U. won't allow illegal migrants to be returned to France, we now know that the Irish police have been removing illegal migrants to Belfast and Holyhead. Only recently, 50 people who crossed the border into Ireland were found to have invalid documents or no documents and were returned to the UK under Operation Sonnet. Some of the illegal migrants were put on ferries back to Holyhead.

Many people who have been claiming asylum in the UK have been detained with a view to sending them to Rwanda. They are now taking legal action against the government for illegal detention. The FDA union which represents British civil servants have also started legal action against the Rwanda scheme. They have said that civil servants are being forced to break international law.