Latest news with #illegal immigration
Fox News
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Fox News
Illegal immigrants storm US beaches as Coast Guard battles migrant surge that rose under Biden
The rise in illegal immigration that took place by boats under the Biden administration has created unique dangers for law enforcement, according to a border security expert. Maritime illegal immigration, using boats to enter the U.S. illegally, rose during the Biden administration as a result of the political and economic crises of Haiti and Cuba, according to the Migration Policy Institute. In February 2023, the U.S. Naval Institute said that illegal immigrant interdiction operations were in a "state of emergency" due to societal turmoil in Caribbean countries. Along the border between the U.S. and Mexico in California, illegal immigrants attempt to cross into America using boats as well. On July 12, the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted three people who were trying to enter the U.S. illegally by boat and were apprehended at Imperial Beach in San Diego County, California. Two individuals said they were Mexican, while one said they were Turkish. In January, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a boat carrying 21 illegal immigrants that was headed toward San Diego. Coast Guard officials and Border Protection officials apprehended the illegal immigrants, who were from various countries. "They don't want anyone to drown and die trying to cross into the U.S. Illegally…" "Initial interviews revealed that all individuals claimed Mexican nationality, although subsequent checks identified two passengers as Guatemalan and Salvadoran nationals," the Coast Guard wrote in a press release. California isn't close to the only state having to handle migrant incursions along its shores. In February, the Coast Guard intercepted 132 Haitians on a boat south of the Florida Keys. The Coast Guard boarded the 30-foot vessel and processed the illegal immigrants before they were repatriated to Haiti, according to officials. "The Coast Guard will continue to prioritize strengthening our domestic integrity and disrupting attempts to enter the United States illegally by sea," said Coast Guard District Seven enforcement officer Lt. Zane Carter. "We are steadfast in our mission to safeguard America by securing our maritime borders." Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital that these interdictions create a unique danger for law enforcement authorities. "Well, I've seen a very different pattern, say, between the U.K. and France versus off the U.S. coast, where it seems to be a variety of, you know, if it's professional smugglers with really fast boats trying to bring people in and drop them off, then that's one thing for the Coast Guard to cope with," Hankinson said. "And if it is people organizing themselves in leaky boats with insufficient engines and overcrowded conditions, then it's a different thing. I think for the Coast Guard, for our law enforcement, that the issue of safety is obviously paramount." "They don't want anyone to drown and die trying to cross into the U.S. Illegally, even if they're not supposed to do it, but they're also probably worried about people carrying weapons who are trying to smuggle drugs and people in for money," he added. Hankinson said the U.S. should look at what's happening in the United Kingdom as a case study on what to avoid. The U.K. saw 19,982 cross the English Channel to enter the country in the first six months of 2025, according to Sky News. That figure is up almost 50% compared to the first six months of 2024. "You know, I was born in England. It's tragic what's happening there," he said. "You have a whole family of Palestinians who were allowed to stay, even though they'd applied under a program for Ukrainians. You know it's a sort of national suicide by generosity."
Arab News
3 days ago
- Arab News
Pakistan arrests five suspects involved in human smuggling, defrauding citizens
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has arrested five suspects involved in human smuggling and defrauding citizens, it said on Saturday. The development comes amid a crackdown against agents involved in sending impoverished Pakistanis abroad through dangerous routes, luring them with a chance at a better life in Europe. The latest arrests were made by the FIA in different areas of Gujranwala and Gujrat districts for swindling citizens out of millions of rupees by offering fake visas and jobs abroad. 'The suspects were found involved in illegally sending innocent citizens abroad,' the FIA said in a statement, identifying the suspects as Rifaqat, Shabraiz, Muhammad Siddique, Muhammad Yasin and Qasim Shaheen. Rafaqat and Shabraiz took Rs2.4 million from a citizen for employment in Italy, but sent him to Kyrgyzstan from where he was deported, according to the agency. Siddique took over Rs2 million from a citizen for employment in Spain, while Yasin received more than Rs645,000 promising to find overseas employment to a citizen. Shaheen duped another man into paying Rs4 million for a job in the United Kingdom (UK). 'The accused had gone into hiding after receiving huge sums of money,' the FIA said, adding that an investigation has been launched against them. Earlier this month, the FIA said it had arrested an agent involved in the Morocco boat tragedy, in which dozens of Pakistanis attempting to travel illegally to Europe had drowned near the African country's coast. The boat had set off from Mauritania in January with 86 migrants on board, among them 66 Pakistanis, for the Canary Islands administered by Spain, international rights group Walking Borders had said. Moroccan authorities said on January 16 that 36 people were rescued from the vessel, while Pakistan confirmed survivors of the tragedy included 22 of its nationals. A record 10,457 migrants, or 30 people a day, died trying to reach Spain in 2024. Most of them died while attempting to cross the Atlantic route from West African countries such as Mauritania and Senegal to the Canary Islands, according to Walking Borders. In 2023, hundreds of migrants, including 262 Pakistanis, drowned when an overcrowded vessel sank in international waters off the southwestern Greek town of Pylos, marking one of the deadliest boat disasters ever recorded in the Mediterranean Sea. The Pakistani government has ramped up efforts in recent months to combat human smugglers facilitating dangerous journeys for illegal immigrants to Europe, resulting in several arrests. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has also urged increased collaboration with international agencies like Interpol to ensure swift action against human trafficking networks.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Prosecutions of people smugglers tumble under Starmer
Only 150 people smugglers have been prosecuted in the past year despite Sir Keir Starmer's pledge to smash the gangs, figures obtained by the Conservatives show. Some 153 prosecutions were brought for the most serious people-smuggling offence of assisting illegal immigration, a crime that carries a maximum life sentence. Overall, 446 individuals were charged with an immigration offence between July 2024 and June 2025, only 1 per cent of the 43,309 who crossed in small boats during that time. The Tories claimed the prosecutions were the lowest on record apart from a year during the Covid-19 pandemic. They said prosecutions under section 25 of the Immigration Act 1971 had fluctuated between a low of 274 in 2019-20 and a high of 471 in 2023. However, Labour said the Tories had miscounted. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: 'Keir Starmer boasted he would smash the gangs, but the gangs are laughing at him. ' They've never had it easier and crossings are up 50 per cent as a result. We're now heading towards being the illegal immigration capital of Europe. 'It's clear Starmer is incapable of stopping the boats and his backbenchers don't want him to. The country cannot go on like this - the situation in the Channel is a national security emergency. 'Those that arrive illegally from the safety of France must be swiftly deported so the message is clear: if you break into Britain, you will not get a life here.' A Labour spokesman said: 'Robert Jenrick can reinvent himself as many times as he likes, but he cannot rewrite history. With Labour in office, more people were charged with assisting unlawful immigration in our first year in government than in the entire time that Jenrick was in charge of the Immigration System. Indeed, we charged more people with that offence in our first three months than he managed in his last six. 'But much more important than Robert Jenrick's failures in the past are the ones he is making now, and we don't just mean screwing up this attempted attack story against Labour. 'If he was truly serious about prosecuting dangerous people smugglers, he would not have voted against our new law to criminalise people who endanger the lives of others in the Channel, and would instead be supporting us to take that action against those who cause women and children to suffocate and drown on overcrowded small boats,' they added.
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Labour's grotesque lies about illegal migration are finally being exposed
Sir Keir Starmer is the worst possible Prime Minister at the most inauspicious of times. The lies, double-standards and moral blackmail fuelling our illegal immigration crisis threaten to tear this country apart, and yet Starmer stands frozen, unwilling as well as incapable of rising to the challenge. He is a cardboard cutout of a prime minister, an ideological automaton at a time when the public craves leadership, reassurance and change. If he truly wanted to defuse tensions, and if he were even a half-decent politician, Starmer would make the trip to Essex and, like de Gaulle addressing the crowd in Algiers in 1958, tell the law-abiding middle class protesters in front of the Bell Hotel in Epping that he understands them. He would order the transfer of the asylum-seekers to a better location. He would condemn extremists and agitators of all hues, far-Right as well as far-Left, and insist that all violence is intolerable. He would rebuke Essex Police, the wokest police force in the most Right-wing county, for escorting pro-migrant protestors to the Bell, stating that he opposes any notion of two-tier justice or treating one side of the debate better than the other. He would express his distaste at the booking of a four star hotel in Canary Wharf to house migrants, and demand cheaper pop-up sites be found. In the real world, we must make do with Starmer's platitudes and untruths. Why did his social media account claim that 'we will stop at nothing to tackle illegal migration' when that is the very opposite of what Labour is doing? Starmer refuses to pull levers that might work: his priority is not stopping the boats but maintaining the human rights orthodoxy at any cost. Yes, Starmer would love it were something to turn up and immigration, legal and illegal, were to drop – he may even get his way if Rachel Reeves bankrupts Britain – but he has no desire to pro-actively do anything radical about it. The PM refuses to pull out of the ECHR or of the UN Refugee conventions, he is wedded to the obsolete principal of non-refoulement and he scrapped the Rwanda scheme. He won't consider jailing illegal arrivals. He will never take truly drastic action towards the people traffickers. This newspaper revealed last week that a High Court judge, in a case brought against the Foreign Office by an Afghan living in the UK seeking to bring relatives to Britain, that 'family members' did not have to have a 'blood or legal connection' to the applicant. Down that road lies madness. Starmer's ludicrous, ECHR compliant plan for a ' thousands in, fifty out' pilot plan with France won't work, if it is ever signed off by the EU. He tells people smugglers he 'will destroy your business model, piece by piece', at the very time they drop off yet more boatloads. His idea to crack down on illicit activity is to 'share asylum accommodation locations' with food delivery services 'so they can take action if riders are staying there.' Downing Street officials believe that Britain's social fabric is 'fraying at the edges', and yet the best the Government can do is to demand greater integration and the restoration of trust, as if that were easy. Laughably, the Prime Minister reportedly believes that his policy to improve school attendance is already improving community relations. None of this is even close to being commensurate to the scale of the crisis. In The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a basis for social policy, Thomas Sowell, the African-American economist, explained why politicians like Starmer lose touch with reality and end up despising their electorates. Sowell, who to her credit Kemi Badenoch often cites approvingly, divides the world into groups: the anointed elites, those we now call the woke Blob, ego-crazed idiot-savants who believe that simplistic social engineering can solve all of the world's problems, and followers of the 'tragic vision', who have the humility to understand the complexities and trade-offs inherent to human societies. The anointed include Labour, the Corbynites/Greens, Lib Dems and the many wet Tories. Followers of the 'tragic vision' include Reform, sensible Tories (including Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Jacob Rees-Mogg) and the 53 per cent of the public who tell YouGov that immigration is one of the most important issues facing Britain. The anointed are sure they know best, and don't react well when their grand schemes to 'save humanity' – the ECHR, the Human Rights Act or open borders – go wrong. Much of this is narcissism: these elites don't care as much about the downtrodden as they do about feeling good about themselves. The anointed, Sowell explained, operate by picking a 'mascot', a marginalised group, to champion, such as small boat migrants, while simultaneously demonising a 'target', such as ordinary 'normies' who believe immigration has gone too far. The anointed are above all dogmatic. Their beliefs are not susceptible to auto-correction, to Popperian falsification, to feedback from reality: they simply dismiss all contrary empirical evidence. They consider themselves to be well-intentioned and morally superior, so any criticism of their axioms must be dismissed as false consciousness, prima facie evidence of racism. So deranged, so deluded are these elites that they cannot conceive that their critics could genuinely, for non-xenophobic reasons, worry about filling hotels in residential areas with young men with no passports and no real known identity, and the risk this could pose to young girls. They can't accept that voters might genuinely be affected by housing and public services shortages exacerbated by mass migration (in a world of sluggish supply), and not be merely driven by prejudice. They cannot understand that putting up migrants in costly hotels, at a time when taxes are at record highs, is insulting to millions. They fail to comprehend why, in this context, the fact that a school banned a 12-year old girl from wearing a Union Flag dress on Culture Celebration Day, could be considered a provocation. Starmer and Labour will never change, and neither will the rest of the anointed class. The only answer is to replace them. I have a feeling that the next election will be called sooner than many believe.
The Independent
6 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
First sanctions targeting people-smuggling gangs take effect
The first wave of sanctions aimed at key figures in people-smuggling gangs have come into force in a bid to hit those involved in assisting illegal immigration to the UK. They target 25 individuals and entities including a small boat supplier in Asia and gang leaders based in the Balkans and North Africa. They also hit 'middlemen' putting cash through the Hawala legal money transfer system in the Middle East, which is used in payments linked to Channel crossings. Albanian Bledar Lala, leader of the Belgian operations of an organised smuggling group, and a company in China that advertised small boats for people smuggling on an online marketplace are among those sanctioned. Foreign Secretary David Lammy said it was a 'landmark moment in the Government's work to tackle organised immigration crime (and) reduce irregular migration to the UK'. 'From Europe to Asia we are taking the fight to the people-smugglers who enable irregular migration, targeting them wherever they are in the world and making them pay for their actions. 'My message to the gangs who callously risk vulnerable lives for profit is this: we know who you are, and we will work with our partners around the world to hold you to account.' The measures aim to target organised crime gangs wherever they are in the world and disrupt their flow of cash, including freezing bank accounts, property and other assets, to hinder their activities. It will be illegal for UK businesses and banks to deal with anyone named on the list. The move follows legislation being introduced under the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill to ramp up enforcement powers for police forces and partners to investigate and prosecute people smugglers.
