UK to pay for French officers to deport asylum seekers from war-torn countries

 

UK to pay for French officers to deport asylum seekers from war-torn countries

 

Removal site in Dunkirk will hold people of 10 nationalities trying to reach UK in small boats under new £660m deal with French

 

Rajeev Syal Home affairs editor

Thu 23 Apr 2026 15.53 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/23/uk-to-pay-for-french-officers-to-deport-asylum-seekers-from-war-torn-countries

 

The UK will pay for 200 French officers to detain and deport people seeking asylum from some of the world’s most oppressive and war-ravaged regimes under a new UK-France deal to try to reduce Channel crossings.

 

In what is being billed as the first time the French government has agreed to target those heading to the UK in small boats, a removal site in Dunkirk will be used to hold people from 10 countries: Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam and Yemen. The Home Office said they were the top 10 nationalities who crossed the Channel by small boat last year.

 

They would be detained by officers paid for by the UK and deported to their home countries or other EU countries they had passed through, officials said. The funding for this would come out of a £162m package to trial new approaches to prevent small boat crossings, which is in addition to a new three-year, £500m baseline deal with the French to boost enforcement action on beaches in northern France.

 

The detain-and-deport approach is part of a £162m extra “payment by results” package, on top of the £500m baseline deal agreed for the next three years to March 2029.

 

Officials claim that hundreds, possibly thousands, of people will be detained under the targeting scheme. However, EU countries including France have previously struggled to deport people to neighbouring countries under the Dublin agreement.

 

Jo Cobley, the chief executive of Safe Passage International, said it was “disgraceful and unlawful” to deport people to unsafe countries.

 

“With no accessible safe routes and the government’s suspension of refugee family reunion, the only way to reach the UK to ask for protection is across the Channel – punishing people with detention, deportation threats and police violence does not change that,” she said.

 

“It’s disgraceful, and unlawful, to return people to active war zones or where they face persecution, in countries like Afghanistan, Sudan and Iran, and to target people who would have very likely been granted protection in the UK.”

 

Home Office sources said the UK would only ask for detainees to be deported if their home countries had been ruled to be safe, such as Vietnam.

 

 

Those asylum seekers who could not be sent to their home countries could be sent to third EU countries if they had already been processed and fingerprinted there, sources said.

 

Speaking to journalists in Dunkirk, Mahmood defended asking the French to remove people from Iran and Afghanistan if they had travelled through safe EU countries, saying that the EU has drawn up “the new pact on migration and asylum” to allow EU members to do so.

 

“If safe, they can be returned to their home country. And if not safe, then to a safe country from Europe that those people have transited through. That is where the French want to go and that is why we have invested in the detention centre,” she said.

 

She said the UK would not be able to stop the boats without paying France hundreds of millions of pounds. Dismissing Nigel Farage’s call for the UK not to pay the French a penny as “fundamentally unserious”, she said: “This is a shared problem. It has a joint response, and that is the right way to deal with these problems.

 

“And absolutely our collaboration with the French is critical to our ability to deal with the boats crossing the Channel.”

 

Officials said the site in Dunkirk, which has a 140-person capacity, was expected to be in operation by the end of 2026.

 

First pledged by Rishi Sunak’s government in 2023, the site is still under construction, with none of the buildings yet completed.

 

The approach of targeting people by their nationalities would be trialled using existing capacity at a nearby removal centre in Coquelles from next month.

 

Investment in the new detention centre will come from the £162m flexible, results-based pot. If it is not delivering value for money and proven results in its first year, the funding will be withdrawn from the scheme.

 

Sile Reynolds, the head of asylum advocacy at Freedom from Torture, said: “Caring people across the country will be outraged to discover their money is funding the detention of survivors of torture and war in France; people like the survivors we support who have fled unimaginable atrocities from conflicts in Sudan, Iran and Eritrea; people whose only ‘crime’ was hoping the UK would offer them sanctuary.”

 

She said survivors of torture and trauma should never be detained. “Even the briefest period in detention can cause profound damage, increasing the risk of suicide and self-harm. The idea that they will be swiftly returned to their home country is grossly misleading, bearing in mind the risk of persecution that so many of these people face on return.”

 

The French government normally takes 30 days from detaining migrants to deportation.

 

The deal was signed on Thursday by Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, and her French counterpart, Laurent Nuñez, at a ceremony in Dunkirk.

 

A 50-strong riot squad would be trained in “crowd control tactics” and would “stop illegal migrants in their tracks”, according to the Home Office. UK funds are expected to pay for batons, shields and teargas to deal with “hostile crowds and violent tactics”.

 

The announcement follows protracted negotiations between the two countries over how to halt unauthorised small boat journeys, and who should pick up most of the cost. The previous £478m, three-year deal collapsed on 31 March.