Sir Keir Starmer's flagship "one in, one out" scheme is returning only 12 migrants a week to France, falling short of the initial promise of 50 per week. Since its launch last August, 377 people have been returned to France under the pilot, while 380 migrants have been allowed to apply for asylum in the UK from France.
Up to 21,000 asylum seekers who have waited for a year for their claims to be processed could be allowed to enter the jobs market so they can support themselves, the Home Office has said, as part of a package of measures to be announced on Thursday. As the government seeks to empty asylum hotels, claimants who break the law, work illegally or are found to have enough assets to live without support will from June be ejected and lose their support payments.
Project Play, an NGO that has worked with 2,192 children hoping to cross the Channel from northern France to the UK to claim asylum in the last two years, has documented the impact of the hostile conditions in northern France due to regular teargassing, evictions and dinghy-slashing by the French police. During that period the NGO documented the deaths of 22 children trying to cross the Channel, including five last year.
I do a video a day when I'm on my dog walk in Lund, and I try to find different topics to talk about. My son pointed out to me a video from national broadcaster SVT about a guy named Shahdad who came here from Iran when he was 14. Now he's 25 and he was about to be deported, even though his mum has a permanent residency and he had a job, so I did a video on him, because I didn't agree with that.
Germany has no equivalent of the US' specialized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, though that would change if the Bavarian branch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) had its way. Apparently directly inspired by the actions of ICE under President Donald Trump's administration, an internal paper from the far-right party seen by the German newspaper taz this week proposed that a new authority be created within the Bavarian state police named the Asyl-, Fahndungs- und Abschiebegruppe (AFA), or the "Asylum, Tracing and Deportation group."
The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is the European Union's legal framework to create uniform, fair, and efficient standards for processing asylum applications. The system's reform, agreed in 2024, will become legally binding in Germany and throughout the EU in June, 2026. EU member states had a two-year implementation period during which the new rules including stricter border procedures were transposed into national law.