Gotcha! Data, Information and Channel crossing.
This short commentary considers the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act (BSAIA 2025) and the new criminal offences that came into force this week. The BSAIA and the prosecution of these new offences rely heavily on the use of remote intelligence.
We are in an age dominated by the wizardry of remote, counterintelligence methods. These produce vast amounts of raw data and promise an objective picture of border crossing that will keep everyone safe and secure on our island home. But there’s always a huge difference between ‘data’ and ‘information’ especially when trying to understand complex social issues such as who, how and why people move. All data needs interpretation and interpretation is based on the assumptions we make and the questions we ask. Uncritical interpretation just confirms existing biases and the way we frame a question dictates the answer we get. Looking for a criminal, we will find a criminal.
In this essay, I’ll give some examples of how more data can lead to less information and result in misunderstandings, mistreatment, mistakes and terrible consequences for vulnerable people.
The new rules contained in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act (2025) came into force on the 5th of January. They have empowered British Border Force officials to take mobile phones from people arriving in the UK through ‘illegal routes’ – i.e. making Channel crossings in small boats. Officials at the Manston Processing Centre in Kent must now search new arrivals for mobile phones and have powers to search for SIM cards hidden in the mouths of children and adults. The Home Office claims that data downloaded from these phones will dismantle the smuggling gangs that facilitate Channel crossing and news of this new power has been widely covered in the UK media. Less covered has been the swathe of other criminal offences created by the Act.
The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act (2025) creates offences which make the Government’s assumptions about people crossing the Channel in small boats very clear. They are extraterritorial (they don’t need to be committed within UK territory) and are only applicable to people entering the UK through the irregular, ‘small boat’, route. They do not apply to asylum-seeking migrants arriving by lorry or through other routes. The Home Office boasts that the new Act will use counterterror methods against border crossers and makes plain the long-standing rhetoric that Channel crossers are dangerous threats to national security and are wilfully engaged in deceit and criminal activity. This narrative now dominates policy and mainstream media and it is taken as read that the general public share and accept this view.
The first arrest made under the BSAIA 2025 was made only hours after it came into force and a young person, presumably identified remotely with ‘hands on the tiller’ was arrested and charged with endangering the lives of the 46 people in the boat he was onboard. He was put before Margate Magistrates Court two days after he landed at Dover. He has pleaded not guilty, and has been remanded into custody awaiting trial at Canterbury Crown Court next month. The new offences, outlined by Dr Vicky Taylor here, are extremely broad and they criminalise ordinary, and crucially important, activities such as checking the weather and tide times. Remote surveillance and data collection is known to lead to guilt by association and the Captain Support project has documented the cases of many migrants identified remotely and convicted of trafficking offences even before this new power came into force.
The power to collect mobile phone data (and to search the mouths of migrant children) implies migrants are the kind of people who are willing to risk the wellbeing of their children to achieve their ends. Accordingly, the unpleasant business of ‘processing’ on arrival is justified and has just got worse for tired, frightened and potentially traumatised people. Already subjected to queues and questioning in unfamiliar languages and in settings where power imbalances are great, they now face the loss of their phones and the threat of arrest. Even without the humiliation of intimate searches, the removal of mobile phones from newly arrived migrants in the UK is cruel and unnecessary. How are migrants to let their family and friends know they have arrived safely? Will all numbers that appear on the phone of someone who has crossed the Channel become suspect?
Collecting the vast amounts of digital data these new offences require presents border control as modern and technical; spectacular but bloodless. We may imagine heroic data analysts processing and triangulating data to uncover plots and conspiracies. Hunched over laptops, they protect us from a dangerous enemy rather than from desperate people seeking safety. Collecting this kind of disembodied data creates the kind of ‘Gotcha’ moment that is much beloved of asylum adjudicators. I have seen many examples of a Home Office Presenting Officer (the HOPO) theatrically presenting a piece of ‘evidence’ that they think will trip up an asylum seeker and fatally undermine the credibility of their case. Typically these moments relate to inconsistencies in the timings of events or the details of a journey. The HOPO can check back on the details of an interview to declare an asylum seeker is lying when in reality they might have just forgotten a timeline, an address or simply be struggling to remember a specific event in a disorientating fog of trauma. How, for example, will the young man arrested on Monday (aged around 18), be making sense of his journey from a small boat in the icy Channel, to arrest, to a hearing in a Magistrates Court, to a prison cell in just three days?
There will be legal challenges to the operationalisation of this new policy but the credibility of individual asylum claims will be undermined by ‘evidence’ collected from mobile phones. We have, of course, been here before and the case of an unaccompanied asylum seeking child stands out in my memory. His case and identity was compromised by evidence found, not on a phone but in his clothes. He arrived in a refrigerated lorry in the 2000s and was identified as a child by Social Services. During his asylum interview, he stated that he knew no-one in the UK and he was granted Temporary Leave to Remain (TLR). TLR allowed him a relatively normal life until he turned 18. As an adult, his case for asylum was rejected and he had to appeal his case to prevent deportation. Back when his clothes had been searched on arrival, he had been wearing three coats – after all, he had been hiding in a refrigerated lorry – and it was recorded on his file that scraps of paper with phone numbers were in the pockets of these coats. “Gotcha!” said the HOPO arguing that these numbers cast doubt on the boy’s whole story as, arriving as a child in borrowed clothes, he had not declared or explained them. It took years of expert and dogged legal support to prevent his deportation and to ensure he was allowed to stay.
This story of seeking asylum from more than twenty years ago has obvious parallels for current policy. It describes over-zealous asylum adjudicators not just testing a case but actively trying to disprove one through shards of data presented as information and evidence. Instead of seeing a vulnerable person, asylum adjudicators, Border Force and even the Criminal Prosecution Service (CPS) are encouraged to use the flimsiest of evidence to deny protection to people they have learned to see as threats.
The asylum system, especially as relates to illegalised small boat arrivals, is increasingly reliant on ‘intelligence’ and on vague, but exciting-sounding counter-terrorist methods. We may be seduced by the idea that these methods produce hard, objective data - fingerprints trace where a person has been; mobile phone data give us a search history and tells us who a person knows; drone footage shows us the crossing from France in real time. But this is just data, it is not information about the person seeking asylum. For data to become information it needs interpretation and interpretation is a deeply human process requiring open-mindedness and context. If people crossing the Channel are seen as just suspect, damaged border-crossers with criminal and even terrorist intent there is no space for a human interpretation of evidence. We all find ourselves in a very dangerous place.
Photo credit: UvK
