Public data sharing designed to facilitate immigration enforcement raids are rarely effective, and instead works as a surveillance mechanism to deter migrants from accessing vital public services, says the Migrants’ Rights Network (MRN).
In the UK, the Home Office uses 19 Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) squads to carry out regular immigration raids across the country, which aim to track down and remove undocumented migrants or people without the right to work.
Published in the wake of the new Labour government announcing a “major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity”, including increased detentions and deportations, a report by the MRN details how UK Immigration Enforcement uses data from the public, police, government departments, local authorities and others to facilitate raids.
This includes tip-offs from the public, which generate 60,000 pieces of intelligence a year for Immigration Enforcement; data sharing agreements between the Home Office and different government bodies, including the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) among others; and data sharing agreements with financial institutions.
MRN noted these information sharing agreements can have serious consequences for people subject to immigration criminalisation measures, because they are banned from accessing many vital public services, including free secondary non-emergency healthcare, and prevented from claiming benefits.
It added that while raids-related data sharing with the Home Office decreased or stopped in the wake of the Windrush scandal becoming widespread public knowledge and the consequent legal challenges that followed, new agreements have since been put in place.
Outside of government organisations, this includes a data sharing agreement with the financial sector that was restarted in April 2023, which requires banks and building societies to carry out checks against the Home Office’s immigration database on a quarterly basis. Affected individuals are then reported back to the Home Office for immigration enforcement measures.
“However, because most immigration raids take place as a result of ‘tip-offs’, this data sharing is not really ‘effective’ in identifying and deporting undocumented migrants,” said the MRN. “Data sharing therefore acts primarily as a surveillance mechanism for migrants and a deterrent to migrants accessing essential services.”
Julia Tinsley-Kent, head of policy and communications at the MRN and one of the report’s authors, added the data sharing in place – coupled with government rhetoric about strong enforcement – essentially leads to people “self-policing because they’re so scared of all the ways that you can get tripped up” within the hostile environment.
She added this is particularly “insidious” in the context of data sharing from institutions that are supposedly there to help people, such as education or healthcare bodies.
“It just means that people don’t go and access their healthcare because they’re scared that then they’re going to get flagged by the NHS, and that’ll get shared with the Home Office. It means they start self-policing on a day-to-day basis. It’s all just an intimidation tactic,” she said. “Health and safety should be something that just happens without ICE turning up at your door, asking you questions.”
Noting that many of the institutions sharing immigration data with the Home Office are already less accessible to migrants than others, an anonymous member of the Anti Raids Network (ARN) – an informal network of local groups resisting immigration raids across the UK – told Computer Weekly that these data sharing practices work to extend the hostile environment into daily life by further reducing people’s access to public services.
Because most immigration raids take place as a result of ‘tip-offs’, data sharing is not really ‘effective’ in identifying and deporting undocumented migrants – it acts primarily as a surveillance mechanism for migrants and a deterrent to migrants accessing essential services Migrants’ Rights Network
“There are areas of the British system that are already quite inaccessible to people of colour and migrants – either because of cultural reasons, structural racism, accessibility issues around language, or experiences of direct racism – and then on top of that there is chance that if you go to a GP or DWP appointment, you’re possibly jeopardising your safety, security and, ultimately, your immigration status in the country,” they said.
“If you know about that, then it makes those institutions even more inaccessible, but if you’ve only recently arrived and you don’t know about it … you’re essentially walking into a trap when you’re just trying to access basic services.”
Computer Weekly contacted the Home Office about the contents of the MRN report and the claims made about the role of data sharing in facilitating immigration raids.
“We make no apologies for sharing intelligence or data that helps us crack down on criminal gangs who treat those they illegally employ inhumanely and abhorrently,” said a Home Office spokesperson. “Vulnerable individuals can find themselves trapped in unsafe and insecure conditions, facing exploitation and even modern-day slavery, often facilitated by organised criminal gangs.”
A lack of clarity
Tinsley-Kent noted that while the data sharing has a pervasive psychological effect due to the environment it creates for those affected, there is still a lack of clarity over how specific data transfers between public bodies can be linked to specific raids that have been carried out.
“Trying to get information on what’s going on has been really, really difficult… We FOI’d lots of different public bodies and were met with, ‘no we don’t have that data’, ‘it’ll take us too long to find it’, or ‘it’s not in the public interest for us to provide that data’,” she said, adding it is not at all clear where all this data is being stored and who exactly has access to it.
The report notes, for example, there is a “complete lack of data held by educational institutions, such as Ofsted and the Office for Students,” on its intelligence sharing with immigration authorities, which Tinsley-Kent said makes it hard to gain a full picture.
“The border is going to go totally digital by 2025, and that obviously relies on having big datasets and places to store biometrics and so on, and we need to understand whose holding what data and who has access to that data. This is an ongoing thing we’re concerned about,” she said.
Another area where there is a lack of clarity is over how the data gathered for immigration enforcement purposes is acted upon, with the MRN report noting that increasingly hostile rhetoric from politicians towards migrants raises further questions about the thoroughness of the pre-raid surveillance and intelligence analysis.
Tinsley-Kent said while there is guidance in place about the pre-raid checks authorities are meant to conduct – which are essentially there to establish the immigration status of the people being targeted prior to any raid commencing – it is “confusing” and does not shed any light on how they are making decisions about which raids to carry out.
Highlighting the fact that 10% of those targeted by raids are British nationals, and the example of a specific raid in a workplace where the business owner had never heard of the Home Office’s target, she added it is also unclear how people’s immigration status is being determined by the surveillance conducted.
“As it is unclear how officials conducting the pre-visit checks determine the immigration status from surveillance at the premises, it cannot be ruled out that racial profiling constitutes a substantial part of these checks,” said the MRN report.
The anonymous ARN organiser added that people subject to immigration raids are often in the dark about how and why they were targeted.
“Because it happens through surveillance at such a granular level, people don’t know what led to the raid in the first place. Your child could have said the wrong thing at school to a teacher who has a certain type of politics, who then made a claim to the reporting tool the government has, so it’s really, really hard to say what actually leads up to raids, other than the obvious that it’s racial profiling targeting businesses that are owned by particular racial or ethnic categories,” they said, noting that home secretary Yvette Cooper recently highlighted garages, car washes and nail bars as targets: “It’s mainly racialised people that run those businesses.”
The purpose of raids
As part of the hostile environment policies, the MRN, the ARN and others have long argued that the function of raids goes much deeper than mere social exclusion, and also works to disrupt the lives of migrants, their families, businesses and communities, as well as to impose a form of terror that produces heightened fear, insecurity and isolation.
MRN noted, for example, that although deportation rates have increased significantly since the Nationality and Border Act came into effect in July 2022, the median deportation rate following an immigration raid between September 2022 and February 2023 was still just 9.17%.
“It is arguable that removals are not necessarily the end goal of raids, but they are rather meant to humiliate, racially subjugate and inflict harm on the ‘other’, specifically migrants and/or racialised people. Raids can also be viewed as a cruel form of punishment that is inflicted by an agency outside of the criminal system. Combined with the lack of scrutiny and opaque nature of raids, it is incredibly difficult to challenge them,” it said.
“As such, immigration raids have been depicted as a form of state-enabled kidnapping. Framing immigration raids as a form of kidnapping is not a new concept, and as has been suggested elsewhere, repurposing the term is essential to demonstrate how states capture and exert control over migrants.”
The ARN organiser added that the use of “fear as a technique of violence” is an “intentional design of the hostile environment” that works to ensure people coming to the UK for safety or sanctuary never feel comfortable.
“Your experience of being a migrant doesn’t stop at the point of arrival. There’s always this feeling of risk or precarity, that anything could change and anyone you interact with, unless it’s in a community space that you know is safe and trusted, could report you for something.”
The MRN further characterises immigration raids as a continuation of colonial “divide and rule” tactics that work to actively foster tensions between different social groups by making them see each other as threats to either their lives or livelihoods.
“Colonisers often hired only one native group as police officers, which encouraged the non-chosen population to view the other native group as its enemy, thus obscuring the colonial structure that oppressed them,” it said. “Similarly, immigration raids as a mechanism of the hostile environment are a continuation of divide and rule – Immigration Enforcement operations are designed to inflict violence and harm, and to destroy the social fabric through fermenting divisions.
“Immigration raids create an atmosphere of distrust amongst communities, creating an environment where they react to a perceived ‘threat’ or ‘other’, and are inclined to report them to the Home Office.”
Dehumanisation in an international hostile environment
According to Tinsley-Kent, this process of “othering” migrants is further entrenched by the UK’s data-driven enforcement practices in this area, which works to categorise and quantify people, thus “depersonalising” them and making the violence inflicted on them easier to carry out and sell to the public.
“When you reduce people to that number, it makes it a lot easier to then externalise borders, justify detention, justify deportation,” she said, adding it should be no surprise the new government is pushing an “incredibly numerical” approach in its rhetoric about ramping up immigration raids.
“They’ve said, ‘we’re going to get X many people, have 290 spaces open up in this new detention centre’, so they’re setting targets, and that means it’s all down to these numbers.”
The ARN organiser said this process of datafication, as well as the language it uses to describe human beings, changes how people perceive others coming to the UK and is an enabler of the violence being inflicted.
It’s the creep of tech within everyday life and, as we’ve seen from the outcome of our research on raids, it is always racialised people that are the brunt of that Julia Tinsley-Kent, Migrants’ Rights Network
“This is a tactic that has been used by colonial powers for hundreds of years to denigrate and dehumanise populations that you want to pacify or enact violence onto,” they said. “Language is so important, and over the last 10 to 20 years, we’re so used to seeing people seeking asylum and migrants spoken about in number form, and the only time we see positive stories is where the media has picked them up as an example of a ‘good migrant’ that conforms to ‘British values’.”
Petra Molnar, a Harvard faculty associate and author of The walls have eyes: Surviving migration in the age of artificial intelligence, described the data sharing as “yet another insidious manifestation of migration surveillance and control”, adding that reducing people to datapoints on screens “furthers their dehumanisation and plays into a growing panic around migration, resulting in more and more intimidation, surveillance and control of people on the move”.
“Unfortunately, these surveillance-driven raids in the UK are part of a global trend of border datafication that harms communities and infringes on people’s right to seek asylum and freedom of movement, rights protected by international law and domestic legislation – rights which are available to every single person on the planet.”
Tinsley-Kent made a similar point, noting the datafication of people and borders is part of a wider trend across Europe and the US that is contributing to an “international hostile environment”, particularly for people from the Global South.
She added similar dynamics to the UK case are replicated in the data collection and sharing practices that take place internationally on an inter-government level, which means the technologies and data sharing in place are essentially acting as “racist deterrence-based measures” that follow someone from the moment they cross a border to the moment they interact with a GP.
“It’s the creep of tech within everyday life and, as we’ve seen from the outcome of our research on raids [in the UK], it is always racialised people that are the brunt of that.”