“Security at the heart”: Criminalisation and Labour’s Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill 2025

This blog was written by Vicky Taylor and Catriona Götz. Vicky is a DPhil Candidate at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the criminalisation of people crossing the English Channel in ‘small boats’. Catriona is an MA candidate at Humboldt University of Berlin and Research Assistant at the University of St Gallen in Law and Anthropology. 

Last week, the UK’s Labour Government announced its new Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, intended to, in the Home Secretary’s words, “provide law enforcement with the powers they need to protect the integrity of the UK border”. In this blog, we provide an early commentary on the expanded criminalisation provisions contained within the Bill, drawing on our experiences researching and working in solidarity with people criminalised for crossing the border to the UK. We provide evidence of who is currently being imprisoned under offences rhetorically justified as ‘counter-smuggling’, and raise concerns about Labour’s ongoing approach (see Free Movement for a useful explainer on the Bill as a whole).

Since gaining power in July 2024, Labour’s approach to irregularised migration has followed that of the previous Conservative government, pursuing a securitised agenda in the Channel. In the weeks after winning the election, the Home Secretary announced the creation of a new Border Security Command to coordinate the state’s response to ‘organised immigration crime’. At a meeting of the European Political Community in the same month, Starmer promised to put “security at the heart of UK’s reset with Europe” (emphasis added). Labour has also pursued an aggressive returns agenda, boasting about the number of refused asylum seekers and ‘foreign national criminals’ who have been returned or deported, often, as the Observer reported, without access to legal representation.

The new Border Security Bill, as indicated in the name, firmly positions “security at the heart” of Labour’s response to irregularised migration. The government has advertised it as introducing ‘counter-terror style powers’, which, according to its explanatory notes, aim “to deter and penalise those involved in organised crime, with new powers to pursue, disrupt and arrest those responsible for facilitating organised immigration crime”. As researchers have well documented, since 9/11, the framing of migration as a security or counterterrorism issue has been used in a variety of contexts as a means of tightening border controls. This legislation is no exception. 

Criminalisation across the Channel: the current picture

Research on the application of such crimmigration offences globally shows that, while often justified as targeting only the ‘most evil’ of people smugglers, in reality, they are used routinely and predictably against a wider range of actors, including most often, people on the move themselves (see, for example, the work of Borderline Europe, Arci Porco Rosso, Captain Support, El Hiblu 3 Campaign, and Free Ibrahima Campaign).

At sea borders, people on the move are often coerced or compelled to steer the dinghy to enable the safe passage of both themselves and others. For governments seeking to bolster arrest figures, these individuals provide an easy, visible target (see Captain Support’s blog series from 2024). These arrests depoliticise and obscure from view the reasons why people are forced to migrate irregularly, placing blame upon those crossing borders, rather than asking critical questions of the structures which force them to do so. 

As Vicky has previously written for this blog (and with others in this research report), the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 (NABA 2022) expanded the scope of criminal offences which could be used against people crossing the Channel to seek safety, justified as necessary to stop ‘criminal smuggling gangs’. Most notably, this included creating a new offence of ‘illegal arrival’, which made it a criminal act to arrive irregularly to the UK regardless of whether the person makes an asylum claim. The creation of this new offence, in turn, expanded the crime of ‘facilitating’ irregular migration. The NABA 2022 also increased the maximum sentences for both offences to four years, and life imprisonment respectively.

Since coming into force on 28th June 2022, these offences have been used to criminalise and imprison people seeking asylum, as well as victims of trafficking and torture, and age-disputed children (see Garden Court on the latter). Usually, they are selected for prosecution either due to being accused of steering the dinghy, or because they have a ‘previous immigration history’ in the UK.

Through quarterly FOI requests, we have pieced together the scale of criminal prosecutions against people for arriving on ‘small boat’:

• From 28th June 2022 until the end of that year, 162 people were charged with ‘illegal arrival’ having arrived on a small boat, 79 of which were arrested due to having been identified steering the dinghy. 
• In 2023, 244 people were charged with ‘illegal arrival’ having arriving on a small boat, 88 of whom were identified as steering. 
• Over the first six months of 2024, 64 people were charged with ‘illegal arrival’, including 38 after being identified as steering. 

This data shows an overrepresentation of certain nationalities among those arrested for steering, including most notably people from Sudan and South Sudan, as they are less likely to have the resources to pay to travel. Those identified as steering are rarely convicted of the higher ‘facilitation’ offence, due to lack of evidence that they were involved any further in organising the journey. Instead, they are convicted of ‘illegal arrival’.

Labour has continued this pursuit. The latest data shows that, in the first six months of their leadership, 86 people arriving on ‘small boats’ were charged with ‘illegal arrival’, including 48 people identified as ‘piloting’ the dinghy. Overall, from the introduction of the NABA offences on 28th June 2022 until the end of 2024, the best available data suggests 556 people were charged with ‘illegal arrival’ having arrived on ‘small boats’, and 455 convicted. 

Criminalisation in the new Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Given the difficulties in bringing successful prosecutions for ‘facilitation’ under the current legislative framework, it is unsurprising that the new Bill introduces several new offences which would significantly expand the state’s ability to use criminal powers against those it labels as having played a role in ‘facilitating migration’. While the Bill repeals the Safety of Rwanda Act (2024) and parts of the Illegal Migration Act (2023), notably, the NABA 2022 remains untouched.

First, the new Bill creates new offences for supplying, offering to supply, and handling “articles for use in immigration crime”, with maximum sentences of 14 years imprisonment. While some (limited) humanitarian exemptions are listed (e.g. the provision of food and drink), and a defence is provided for those acting on behalf of an organisation which assists asylum seekers for free, these clauses considerably broaden the potential prosecution of migrant assistance and support. Importantly, as with all these proposed offences, there appears to be no explicit defence legislated for those on the move themselves. 

An offence of ‘collecting information for use in immigration crime’ is also proposed, including where that information was collected abroad. Such information includes “arranging departure points, dates and times”, or, in other words, information that would be necessary to gather if you were attempting to make such a journey yourself. The Bill makes clear that evidence could include someone’s internet history and downloads. We are concerned that, for example, even evidence of someone looking up the weather could be used as part of the case against them. The collection of this data from people’s phones is facilitated by the new Bill, which creates new powers to enable the search and seizure of electronic devices. 

The Bill also proposes a new criminal offence of “endangering another during a sea crossing”, with a proposed maximum sentence of six years imprisonment. The Home Secretary defended this offence using humanitarian logic, arguing it would be “a deterrent to boat overcrowding … those involved in physical aggression, intimidation or coercive behaviour, including preventing offers of rescue while at sea, will face prosecution”. This offence is therefore concerningly broad, and explicitly aimed at people on the move, who may understandably refuse rescue by French authorities to make it into British waters.

The supporting logic ignores persuasive evidence linking the trends of increasingly overcrowded dinghies and deaths in French waters with policing strategies. As Alarm Phone has shown, restrictions on the supply of dinghies have meant more people are trying to fit onto fewer crafts. The documented use of tear gas against people on the beaches, and slashing of dinghies as they enter the water, forces people into the water before the dinghy is fully inflated. Together, these policing efforts have resulted in more people drowning in the French shallows.

The humanitarian framing of this offence depoliticises the harm produced, rather than reduced, by increasingly hostile bordering practices. Just as in the case of Ibrahima Bah, a young person from Senegal who was convicted of manslaughter by gross negligence last year, these offences provide the state with further tools to scapegoat those trying to seek safety and a better life in the UK. 

Conclusion

To quote Allen Feldman, “arrest is the political art of individualising disorder”. From the state’s perspective, unauthorised migration poses a disorder that must be ordered, a threat to be neutralised. Arrests and convictions identify individuals to be blamed for the violence of border control. The government defends the Bill by arguing, first that it will disrupt organised immigration crime, and second that it will help to stop deaths in the Channel. These policies will likely achieve neither. Instead, they will broaden the scope of offences to be used against people on the move, filling up already overcrowded prisons with people seeking safety and a better life in the UK. 

This bill marks a further intensification of the criminalisation of people crossing irregularly to the UK, and the securitisation of the border.  If the folk devil of the ‘people smuggler’ can be stretched onto the ‘criminal small boat pilot’, it can undoubtedly be stretched further. This Bill provides the government with the tools to do just that. 

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