Australian-style sea patrols needed to return migrants to France, says former Border Force chief

An Australian-style Border Patrol is needed to take migrants back to France, says a former head of the Border Force, as nine more boats were intercepted yesterday.

Tony Smith, a former Border Force Director General, said Britain needed a more “robust” response with enforcement officers with powers of arrest and trained to remove migrants from their dinghies and fingerprint them before returning them to France.

Mr Smith, who will be giving evidence today to MPs investigating the Channel crisis, said Border Force cutters and the French vessels are currently constrained from such Australian-style tactics under international maritime law that only allows officers to intervene if they are invited to do so.

Unless this “search and rescue” role was changed, the migrants could continue to be shepherded by French boats into UK waters where they could “invite” the British to save them or, as has happened in some cases, call for help from the British coastguards or police.

“We need an Australian-style border patrol comprising officers fully trained and equipped with vessels to board, seize and take on board people and goods on the high seas,” said Mr Smith. “It could sit under the Border Force.”

The proposal came as 57 migrants on five boats were intercepted by border force yesterday, making May a record-breaking month for illegal migrant crossings with 588 people picked up in just three weeks.

French authorities stopped four more boats carrying around 100 people, and returned them to France.

Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is seeking to rewrite laws and the international Dublin agreement to make it easier to return migrants to France whether caught at sea or on land. Yesterday she held a virtual meeting with 30 Tory MPs concerned about the surge in Channel migrants.

A Home Office source said the French were sympathetic to negotiating Dublin: “The French do not want to allow crossings as this creates a strong pull factor for more migrants to come across continental Europe to northern France in the hope of crossing too.”

Mr Smith, who chairs an international border association including the UK border force, said a new treaty was needed to allow each country’s border force vessels free range in the other’s territorial waters to pick up migrants and take them back to France.

He said this would kill off the trade by showing attempts to cross would only end in failure.

Mr Smith, who headed Canada’s immigration service in the early 2000s, helped pioneer a similar agreement with the US after 9/11 where joint enforcement teams could cross into each other’s territories to “chase and apprehend” migrants and return them to their “point of providence.”

“We need a co-ordinated agreement that anyone found on the high seas will be intercepted by us or them and they will be returned to their point of providence,” said Mr Smith who will be giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee today (Fri).

Meanwhile, it was claimed yesterday the Home Office has launched an initiative, known as Operation Sillath, to deport migrants who reach the UK in small boats, including some before their asylum claims have been fully considered.