LONDON - Around
200 unaccompanied minors
- mostly Albanian teenagers - have disappeared from the hotels where they were staying while waiting for their asylum claims to be resolved, sparking outrage from rights advocates who They demand
greater protection
and the requirement that legislators solve the problem.
The missing children are among the tens of thousands of people who have arrived in Britain in small boats after crossing the English Channel in recent years.
Migrants, picked up at sea trying to cross the English Channel. (Photo by Ben Stansall / AFP)
Most of the young asylum seekers are staying in hotels waiting for the Home Office to decide their fate, saying they are
free to come and go
as they please despite their age.
Some officials, citing conversations with local authorities, say they believe many of the missing have been
picked up by criminal gangs and exploited
, raising big questions about government failures.
The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but has confirmed that at least 200 asylum-seeking children have disappeared from hotels.
Opposition lawmakers have called into question the entire child housing program.
An investigation published this week by
The Observer
newspaper into a hotel in the Sussex area of southern England revealed that of the approximately 600 unaccompanied minors under 18 who have passed through its doors in the last 18 months, 136 they had been reported missing, and 79 remain unaccounted for.
Last year, data released by the government showed that
more than 222
unaccompanied minors seeking asylum had gone missing from hotels across Britain run by the Home Office.
The government has responded to the widespread criticism with a series of statements this week.
Immigration minister Robert Jenrick said that of the 4,600 asylum-seeking children who had arrived in Britain since 2021, some 440 were missing and only half could be traced.
The local police are in charge of searching for the missing, but have only managed to locate a few.
Of the 200 children who remained missing, the majority are older adolescents, but
13 are under 16 years of age
and one is a woman.
The majority, 88%, are of Albanian nationality.
Some 13,000 of the nearly 40,000 people who crossed the dangerous canal last year were Albanians, and the government of Prime Minister
Rishi Sunak
has vowed to crack down on these arrivals and reject their asylum claims.
Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday, Jenrick said that while the reports were worrying, he had seen no evidence that children were being abducted from hotels.
"We don't have the power to detain unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in these places, and we know that some go missing," he said, acknowledging that asylum seekers were free to leave the hotels.
Peter Kyle, an opposition Labor lawmaker for Hove, the area where the hotel detailed in the Observer report was located, lashed out at the government's
inaction
during an impassioned statement in Parliament on Tuesday.
"The inconvenient truth for us is that if even one child related to anyone in this room disappeared, the world would stop," he said.
"But in the community that I represent, one child has disappeared, then five have disappeared, then a dozen have disappeared, then 50 have disappeared," he said, adding that more than 70 were missing "and nothing is happening."
Yvette Cooper, who heads Labor's immigration policy, speaking to "BBC Breakfast" on Thursday morning, said reports of missing asylum seekers showed that the Conservative government had not taken serious steps to tackle the problem. .
"There is a pattern, but no one is properly investigating it," he said.
"There's no specific unit going after them and saying, 'this is a pattern,' where young people are being trafficked through the canal and then destined for cannabis farms - or prostitution in some of the worst cases." -, but to
organized crime,
being picked up outside these hotels".
Hotels have been used for years to house asylum seekers in Britain amid a shortage of other temporary accommodation.
In July 2021, unaccompanied minors arriving in Britain began to be accommodated in hotels as well.
The UK Home Office is responsible for this accommodation, but partners with private companies to provide the accommodation and also contracts the management of the program to another company.
As the time people wait for their asylum claims to be decided has increased steadily in recent years, so has the number of people staying in these hotels, and rights groups have long criticized
conditions
inside .
of these facilities.
The groups have specifically warned that housing unaccompanied children in hotels does not safeguard some of the most vulnerable asylum seekers and have said they have demanded changes to the way the government processes asylum claims.
More than 100 charities called in an open letter for the government to take action on missing children, demanding that the Home Office stop placing children in "unsafe hotels, where they could be targeted by criminals."
Enver Solomon, director of the Council for Refugees, one of the organizations behind the letter, said in a statement that the government has "a very clear legal duty" to protect these children, but that "it is not doing so, with the equivalent to several classrooms of children who seem to have disappeared into the clutches of those who will exploit and abuse them."
"We know from our work that children who have lived through unimaginable horrors and upheaval and come to our country seeking safety are highly traumatized and vulnerable," he said, adding:
"This is a child protection scandal that councils, police and ministers must urgently address to ensure that each and every separated child matters and
is kept safe
."
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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