A police chief has revealed that asylum seekers have been stopped at airports trying to go home for Christmas.
Border Force Chief Phil Douglas was talking to LBC about how the Border Force conducts outbound checks during Christmas time when he mentioned the incidents.
He said: “We do outbound checks on people to certain flights that are prevalent.
“We do find a lot of people who have claimed asylum in this country and are heading back to their home country for holidays which obviously isn’t allowed.”
Chief Douglas’ comments came as Home Secretary James Cleverly claimed that some people coming to the UK are economic migrants.
Mr Cleverly said the UK had always been “a very generous country to…people who are genuinely seeking protection from persecution, from war, from violence”.
He added that the government recognised there were a lot of people who were “fundamentally economic migrants” and to them, his message was that if they came here illegally they would be sent home.
Immigration has been a key topic in recent weeks after intense scrutiny over the government’s Rwanda plan which has seen more than £350million sent to the country.
Despite this external investment, no migrants have yet been sent to Rwanda.
Mr Cleverly said the government was not yet at a stage where they could have negotiations with airlines who would fly the migrants out.
He said he would fight hard against anyone who tried to stop recent legislation from going through. He warned: “I’m very proud of what we did in that initial drafting. So we think we’re pretty much there.
“But the whole point of the parliamentary process is for people to feed in their ideas, feed in their amendments, feed in their thoughts.
“What I’ve always said is attempts like Keir Starmer’s stunt to try and kill off the bill before it even started progressing through the house. We will very robustly defend ourselves against that.”
In common with Mr Cleverly, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak refused to say whether any airline would fly migrants to Rwanda.
He told MPs at a Commons liaison committee: “I’m confident that we will have the ability to send people to Rwanda. You wouldn’t expect me to comment on commercial conversations.
“It’s absolutely right for what are commercially sensitive negotiations that there is a degree of ability for the government to negotiate these things and then provide the appropriate level of transparency to parliament, which it is doing on an annual basis.”
