#asylum-seekers

#asylum-seekers

Godwin said she does "not anticipate" that she will fund asylum seekers' travel out of her budget. But she added Home Office-issued tickets would offer "a cheaper and greener way for people to attend essential appointments." Asylum seekers living in hotels are given 9.95 per week. Those living in Bristol have to travel to Patchway for mandatory meetings with the Home Office. A single bus ticket costs 2.50, or 6.50 for a daily pass.

Bristol City of Sanctuary has been campaigning for asylum seekers to receive free bus travel. The charity is relying on donations to offer bus tickets that are often used for mandatory Home Office meetings, or to take young children to a creche.

An asylum seeker who took his own life on the Bibby Stockholm barge would still be alive were it not for failures in his care by the Home Office and NHS mental health workers, his family has said. Leonard Farruku, 27, was found dead in December 2023 on the government's former accommodation vessel for migrants, which was moored at Portland Port, Dorset.

Some of those being deported held valid US residency permits, he said, but were nonetheless included on the deportation list, with their consent obtained for repatriation. The confirmation comes after the New York Times, citing unnamed officials in Tehran, said a plane carrying around 100 Iranians left Louisiana late on September 29 and was set to arrive in Iran via Qatar the following day.

The blaze at the Thistle City Barbican Hotel, in Dingley Road, Islington, happened at about 22:50 BST on Wednesday, according to the Met Police. No-one was hurt and staff put out the flames before officers arrived. The force said it was an isolated incident and it wanted to identify one suspect, while it was keeping an open mind about motive. There have been no arrests.

The use of taxis to take asylum seekers from their hotels to appointments must be stopped, the prime minister has said. It comes after a BBC investigation into conditions inside asylum hotels found some migrants taking long journeys by cab, including one 250-mile visit to a GP costing 600. Sir Keir Starmer said people would be "very concerned" by this practice and repeated his commitment to end the use of hotels "as quickly as possible."

Bay Area immigrant rights advocates have filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration to end its controversial immigration courthouse arrests and stop federal officers from detaining people for days in a San Francisco holding facility not meant for overnight use. The unprecedented tactic has triggered heated protests, with some activists attempting to block arrests and getting into clashes with ICE officers.

Although this man and woman did not know each other, Judge Patrick O'Brien called them to the stand together. Before their hearings began, O'Brien asked the Department of Homeland Security attorney, "Are there going to be motions?" The attorney replied, "Uhhh, both," referring to the only two asylum-seekers in the courtroom. The department, as it usually does, moved to dismiss both asylum cases.

Confirming that she hopes to take a harder line than her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, she said she would do whatever it takes to cut the number of people entering the UK by irregular routes such as small boats. In a first announcement as home secretary, she proposed to cut the number of visas granted to countries that delay or refuse returns of their citizens who have no right to remain in the UK.

With the Home Office, I have been putting military planners into their border command and into their planning for the future. We are looking at the potential use of military and non-military sites for temporary accommodation for the people who come across on these small boats that may not have a right to be here or need to be processed rapidly before we can decide whether or not they should say or whether or not we deport them,

The latest Home Office figures show that at the end of June 2025, there were 1,073 asylum seekers being housed in hotels, known as "contingency accommodation", in Sussex. The majority are living in West Sussex, with 1,018 divided between six or seven hotels in the county. Mid-Sussex district has the most with 477, followed by Crawley with 268. PA Media Chichester has 161, while Horsham has 112 asylum seekers in hotels.

Are you an asylum seeker and are you considering buying an armoured car, a snowmobile or a timeshare using your Home Office pre-paid cash card? If so, think again, for these are just some of the luxuries on a list of banned items and activities drawn up by the government. Quite how asylum seekers living in hotels who are banned from working but are provided with meals and receive 9.95 a week are expected to afford any luxuries is unclear.

We've obviously got to move forward in relation to closing the hotels and also stopping the crossings. The government always has the burden of doing what's possible and the government is doing the right thing in relation to it, but there's a lot more to do, and if we don't, as a government, do it, then you'll see those opinion polls raised yet further for Reform, because they don't have the burden of having to be practical.

Using hotels for housing vulnerable migrants is the equivalent of what prison reform campaigners have long called warehousing make sure a problematic group is simply corralled somewhere more or less secure, and hope their issues will somehow sort themselves out. The chaos and under-resourcing of the legal processes involved and the shocking levels of delay mean that the conditions are created for maximal insecurity and rootlessness at worst, resentment and criminality.

Three senior judges are expected to rule on Friday afternoon on whether to overturn a temporary injunction to block asylum seekers from being housed at the Bell Hotel in Epping. Somani Hotels, which owns the Essex hotel, and the Home Office are seeking to challenge the High Court ruling that will stop 138 asylum seekers from being housed there beyond 12 September.

When asylum seekers first arrive at Manston, a former military base outside Ramsgate in Kent, they are ushered from one enormous, grubby marquee to the next for a series of interviews and checks. As many as 1,000 people a day are processed at the site after crossing the Channel in small boats, and interviews continue through the night. Upon arrival in the UK, exhausted and disorientated, their phones and other belongings are taken from them and placed in distinctive blue plastic bags.

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