On 30th January, the Government introduced the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Border Security Bill). We are incredibly alarmed about the introduction of a counter-terror approach to migration, particularly in relation to refugees and people seeking asylum. This Government’s approach abdicates their responsibility for creating the situations of harm and pushing them into the hands of ‘intermediaries’* to come to the UK. This Bill is set to dramatically expand the work of the Home Office – or Hostile Office as we call it – to target and restrict the movement of racialised people. This is likely to particularly affect Muslim people seeking asylum, and those from the Global South, as these have traditionally been the areas that the Government has tried to restrict movement from.
Fundamentally, it is clear that the Border Security Bill is more focused on increasing punishment of people who are forced to migrate using unsafe routes; it is about cruelty and bringing numbers of people migrating down while bringing numbers of people deported up, unconcerned with the safety of those people.
Expanding on our previous blog on the Border Security Bill when it was announced, we have now gone through the Bill to highlight its key impacts.
What does a counter-terror approach to migration mean?
We have outlined how the counter-terror system interacts with migration policy in our Hostile Office campaign. The key difference with the Border Security Bill is that for the first time, the counter-terror framework is being used as the primary approach to migration policy. What this means is that excessive powers are able to be brought in with regard to surveillance, pre-crime policing and sentencing. This use of manufacturing a crisis to bring in such legislation mirrors what has happened to Muslim communities with counter-terror powers time and time again. Many of the Border Security Command’s functions have therefore been enabled without any scrutiny; the Border Security Bill exists in part to strengthen and expand these capabilities.
A counter-terror approach also enables the Government to bring in powers that would otherwise be seen as excessive and extreme. Overall, the Bill is intended to target intermediaries, who act as agents or brokers to facilitate the travel of undocumented people, including across the Channel in small boats. To bring in these extreme powers, the Government has framed the issue of undocumented immigration, including for people seeking refugee protection, and those who facilitate it as a ‘global security threat’.
What does the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill do then?
There are several key aspects to the Border Security Bill:
1) Prevention Measures
The Border Security Bill expands Serious Crime Prevention Orders (SCPOs), which are court orders used to prevent individuals who are suspected to be involved in criminalised activity from continuing that activity. Activities typically targeted by SCPOs include drug trafficking, money laundering, and firearms offences. They work by severely restricting someone’s life without placing them in prison, for example by restricting their movement, their phone and social media usage, who they can associate and communicate with, and their finances. The Bill expands this dramatically by speeding up the process of putting an SCPO in place, including by allowing interim restrictions while a full Order is being considered.
A significant section of the Bill is also dedicated to criminalising the provision of supplies and information that could conceivably be used to help someone travel without the required immigration documentation. The Bill does contain exclusions from what can be covered under this, for example food and drink, bedding, medical supplies, but the severely limited list of items omits items like mobile phones, for example. There are also exclusions for prosecution for those possessing or sharing information, for example an academic carrying out research or someone from an organisation that assists people seeking asylum and does not take payment. However, the effect of the Bill in practice could likely lead to people who share vital information from restricting their work for fear of arrest.
2) Foreclosing migration routes for refugee protection
This policy is part of measures to steadily cut off routes to claim asylum, which does not require any kind of legally sanctioned passage under the Refugee Convention. These powers used against people facilitating travel via routes like crossing the Channel come alongside the removal of visa free travel for nationals of countries with a higher rate of people applying for asylum (e.g. Colombians), re-starting deportations with countries like Iraq at the same time as rushed asylum decisions have led to an unprecedented increase in appeals being lodged. As a result, the Border Security Bill is yet another attempt of the Government to further criminalise people in relation to a ‘crisis’ that is created by their own policies.
3) Surveillance
The Border Security Bill increases the surveillance of migrants by extending powers to seize people’s devices at the border. This includes powers to access, examine, copy and retain information on a person’s device related to the commission of an immigration offence, and use that information in relation to preventing, detecting, investigating or prosecuting an immigration offence. We are concerned about these wide-sweeping powers of intrusion that also contain many people’s links to families and copies of documents. This also legalises the Home Office’s policy of blanket seizures of devices belonging to people who crossed the Channel in small boats, which was found unlawful in 2024.
Such dramatic expansions to legal seizures of mobile phones are reminiscent of existing counter-terror powers, including Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and its expansion under the Nationality and Border Act 2022 to allow for greater powers to stop, question and search the devices of migrants crossing the Channel without a need for suspicion. A similar practice has been happening in the EU, with Frontex searching migrants’ devices and using that data to track migration journeys. Frontex and Border Force signed an information sharing agreement in 2023 centred around these mapping capabilities.
Biometric surveillance is another key part of the Bill, with the intention to expand the circumstances in which migrants can have their biometrics taken beyond the visa process. In addition, the Bill expands the power to take fingerprints and DNA under counter-terror powers in Scotland by including people detained in facilities other than police stations (e.g. at an airport or sea port).
4) Expanding detention and deportations
Government rhetoric around the Bill focuses on the increased numbers of deportations, which this Bill is designed to increase further. This comes alongside expanding the circumstances in which someone can be detained in immigration detention: Under the Border Security Bill, it would be possible to detain people before a deportation order, meaning detention would not be restricted to when a person’s deportation is imminent. Instead of abolishing detention, where in the UK people are subjected to long periods inside without release dates and subjected to violence, racism and medical neglect, this Bill would instead move to expand it.
5) The legal end to the Rwanda plan but retention of criminalisation
The Border Security Bill does also repeal the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, putting an end to the previous Government’s project of offshore immigration processing in Rwanda specifically, as well as repealing the clause in the ‘Illegal’ Migration Act 2023 that prevented decisions being made on many people’s asylum claims.
However, the clauses of the ‘Illegal’ Migration Act 2023 that criminalised people crossing the Channel in small boats as ‘captains’ if their hand was on the tiller of the boat – a clause that has seen numerous people wrongly imprisoned as ‘smugglers’ – as well as expanded detention powers among other harmful aspects of the Act are retained.
While the repeal of the Safety of Rwanda Act under the Border Security Bill is welcome, the Bill overall is deeply troubling for the approach to migration and the (un)safety of people migrating. This new usage of counter-terror powers, alongside the expansion of surveillance and criminalisation, does nothing for migrants who are still forced to take increasingly dangerous routes into the UK. Such policies cynically use the danger of these existing routes to push through successive anti-migrant measures.
What this Bill is is a further step of the UK border regime to control movement alongside racial and Global South lines. It seeks to restrict even the movement of people seeking asylum, who are not restricted to legally sanctioned routes of migration under international law. As we explored in our Hostile Office report, the use of counter-terror powers against migrants and migratised communities is part of a long history of racist and colonial movement restrictions that have targeted Muslims in particular over the last 25 years.
We call on all those who stand in solidarity with migrants to resist the Border Security Bill and all processes of criminalisation and marginalisation in our communities.
Notes
*Who the Government calls ‘smuggling gangs’ (see: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/counter-terror-style-powers-to-strengthen-ability-to-smash-smuggling-gangs)