British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has made an extraordinary admission about Britain’s Channel migration system, saying “you can almost guarantee that every woman” waiting in northern France has “probably been raped along the journey,” according to reports from the British press.
Mahmood then delivered the line that will reverberate through Britain’s immigration debate: “We’re not in control of this border.” The Home Secretary admitted that criminal trafficking organizations effectively determine which migrants reach northern France and ultimately board dinghies for Britain.
“The sifting of the people that end up in the north of France and are about to get on a dinghy is done by criminal gangs who are also, by the way, people traffickers,” she said. Mahmood added that male migrants are also subjected to abuse, intimidation and threats along the journey.
Her description presents a brutal contradiction at the heart of the Channel system: Britain says it controls immigration, yet organized smugglers can still decide who boards boats and reaches British waters. For immigration restrictionists and sovereigntists, Mahmood’s own language amounts to unusually direct confirmation of their argument that border sovereignty remains compromised.
Mahmood herself argued that such a system cannot determine who eventually settles in Britain. “That is not the model that should decide whether somebody gets to come to the UK, make this their place of sanctuary and ultimately become one of us,” she said.
Her comments came as another large migrant boat reached British waters off Hampshire, bringing the border crisis to Gosport rather than the usual landing points farther east. French rescue vessels shadowed the dinghy before two RNLI boats met it in British waters and brought 149 migrants ashore.
The Home Office confirmed that those aboard would be transported to Kent for processing and undergo health, biometric and security checks. Government officials said contingency arrangements had been activated so the arrivals could be “securely disembarked, checked and processed.”
