Why Tony Smith says arrivals need longer screening

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 22:58

   Which really worries me is the security element. Whatever your views are on immigration and whether or not you think we should allow people, you know, who come from pretty horrible countries in to claim asylum in this country from France, you've really got to screen people properly. You have to thoroughly screen. I spent most of my life on vetting screening. We haven't got any technology that can tell you what's in someone's mind.

2. 23:23

   All you've got when you're dealing with a newly arrived migrant, and that's why they throw their documents away, why they throw their passport away, because that gives you a story. The passport gives you your name, your date of birth, your nationality, your travel. These are all things that we look at at the ports of entry to assess you or when you're applying for a visa. That's all gone. You've got nothing.

3. 23:42

   All you've got is the person's word for what he's doing here. That's it. You can only talk to the person. You can take the biometrics, so we do fingerprints to face, but there's no global watch list of fingerprints and faces that's not really that's going to spot every criminal every person and even if they haven't got any previous how do you know what they're going to do how do you know how this person's going to behave once they're through the border and in the country if you're going to let them in at all i would like to see hardy al-sing reversed i want them detained i want them detained for a lot longer than manston 24 hours is a short-term holding facility.

4. 24:17

   So you get a boatload of 500 in a day, you're scrambling to get the cases cleared because you get sued for unlawful detention if you keep them in Manston for more than 24 hours. Now, if you haven't got anywhere else to move them to, to another immigration detention centre, and like the prisons, they're pretty full, you're under pressure to grant temporary admission pretty quickly. And so that's why people are coming into the communities really, really quickly.

5. 24:41

   There's another team in the Home Office that are responsible for moving them out of Manston and find it in places to stay, either in HMOs or hotels or wherever it may be in the country, but you're not doing the screening to the extent that I would like to see it done. And there was an HMIC report on this a couple of years ago on debriefing, and I would like to see us hold people for a lot, lot longer than that, until we're absolutely as certain as we can be that they don't present a threat, because some of them clearly do present a threat, don't they?

6. 25:10

   And we know that. We have evidence of that now. So we're not just seeing people coming in blatantly in breach of our immigration laws, and they are illegal entrants, whatever anyone else tells you. They are illegal entrants, as defined in Section 33 of the Immigration Act. They've come without a passport. That's the breach of the immigration law. So all other things being, they should be removable as illegal entrants, but because they claim aside them, nonetheless, you've got to make sure as best you can to protect your people.

7. 25:34

   You're protecting the border. That's your job. That's what I lived for, to protect the communities. And that's what I would be expecting my role to be. and if something went wrong, which quite often it did, quite often we let someone prove that we shouldn't have done because someone made a mistake and I used to get beaten up for that. Quite often there'd be a long queue at the airport and I'd get in trouble for that.

8. 25:51

   So you're constantly trying to balance facilitation and control, but what really worries me now is this process that we've established where somebody can literally get within the 12-mile zone, mention the magic word, and within 24 or 48 hours be in one of our communities with minimal vetting. Now, the Home Office say, oh, we do thoroughly check. They do what they can, to be fair to them. They do what they can.

9. 26:16

   They will interview the person, try and figure out if it's a pilot or his evidence is a facilitator, they will prosecute him. But by and large, the majority of them are going to get temporary admission with very limited screening. And then the more you're going to see these stories of, you know, the bad guys, the really bad ones coming in and committing atrocities in this country, then the more people are going to lose faith in our border.