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Home Secretary Suella Braverman has refused to rule out fitting asylum seekers with electronic and GPS tags if they arrive in the UK illegally.
Home Office officials are reportedly considering the idea as a way to ensure that migrants who cannot be housed in the immigration detention estate, which can only hold 2,500 people at a time, do not abscond.
Speaking to Sky News on Monday, Suella Braverman did not deny that her department was considering the move.
“We’ve just enacted a landmark piece of legislation in the form of our Illegal Migration Act. That empowers us to detain those who arrive here illegally and thereafter to swiftly remove them to a safe country like Rwanda,” she said.
“We need to exercise a level of control of people if we’re to remove them from the United Kingdom.”
She continued: “We are considering a range of options. We have a couple of thousand detention places in our existing removal capacity.
“We will be working intensively to increase that but it’s clear we’re exploring a range of options, all options, to ensure that we have that level of control over people so that they can flow through our systems swiftly to enable us to thereafter remove them from the United Kingdom.”
A Home Office source told The Times that the department had been asked to do a “deep dive” into how to keep track of migrants, with other options under consideration including making financial support dependent on them regularly reporting to officials.
While the use of electronic and GPS tagging is being looked at, there are reportedly concerns within the department that it could be incredibly costly.
“Tagging has always been something that the Home Office has been keen on and is the preferred option to withdrawing financial support, which would be legally difficult as migrants would be at risk of being left destitute,” a second Home Office source told the paper.
The department’s main focus is understood to be expanding detention capacity across the UK, with reports that the Home Office is considering reopening centres in Hampshire and Oxfordshire to provide capacity for an additional 290 people.
Ms Braverman told the Commons earlier this year that she was focused on pursuing “a programme of increasing immigration-detention capacity” including using RAF bases and barges.
The first barge to house asylum seekers, the Bibby Stockholm, received its first occupants earlier this month but has since remained vacant after there was an outbreak of legionella onboard the vessel.
The floating facility was expected to eventually host around 500 men at a time, under Government efforts to reduce the use of hotels to house people awaiting the results of asylum claims.
Plans to send illegal migrants to Rwanda have also faced hurdles after it was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court in June, a decision that the Government is appealing.