‘I think it is inevitable a man I grant asylum to will rape or murder a young girl’

Caseworker reveals how illegal migrants trick the system to stay in Britain

 

All mothers have sleepless nights.

We lie awake worrying needlessly that our offspring may be in danger, but Nicky’s fears for her girls are not just fears.

She believes she has very good reason to fret that her three daughters, and millions of other people’s children, are not safe.

“To be honest with you, I think it’s inevitable that one day I will turn on the TV news and there will be some man I have granted asylum to and he will have raped or murdered a young girl, just like my girls.”

Nicky, whose name I have changed to protect her identity, is an experienced caseworker in the UK’s asylum system, which she describes variously to me during a long interview as “unsustainable”, “laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous”, and a “crazy carousel” in which tens of thousands of applicants (“We have to call them ‘customers’ now, can you believe it?”) use every trick in the book to remain in this country.

 

Nicky and her colleagues must somehow assess the claims of those “customers” – mostly men from Africa and Asia who come ashore on the south coast of England, often without identity documents. In 2025 alone, official figures suggest around 37,000 have crossed the Channel by small boat.

 

As she makes me the first of several strong mugs of tea that will keep us both going over the next few hours, she tells me: “Look, we get some people who totally deserve our help, African women, say, who are victims of FGM (female genital mutilation). If we send them back, they are forced to become ‘cutters’ themselves, so we offer them refuge, and I’m glad that we do. And there are trafficked girls, harrowing cases that leave you traumatised. But most people I assess are lying.”

Nicky has warned me to prepare myself for what she is about to reveal. “You’re going to be shocked, Allison.”

 

Am I? Happily perched on a stool in Nicky’s cosy kitchen overlooking the garden of her charming stone cottage just a few breezy miles from the English Channel, ironically enough; I think, well, we all know the asylum system is a mess. How bad can it be? Half an hour later, I am shaken to the core. Prepare yourselves.

How does Nicky know when an applicant is lying?

Some, she claims, repeatedly change their story. “For example, an Iranian will say, ‘I’m claiming asylum because I was politically active against the regime’. There’s no evidence to prove that, and we feel like it’s safe for him to return. Then, he’ll say, ‘Well, I’m a Christian convert now’, although he never mentioned that before. 

“And when I ask him about Easter, he says Easter is to do with ‘chocolate eggs’ and has never heard of the resurrection. But if there’s a live claim lodged, it’s a barrier to removal, and we still have to house him and fund him. Now, men like him will go through the whole process again till they get to appeal rights exhausted, and then they’ll lodge a further submissions claim to say, ‘Well, I’m homosexual now’.”

Disappeared asylum seekers

Further submissions can be made by an asylum seeker after all their appeals are exhausted. It is a way to provide new evidence or information to the Home Office. If the information is judged to be significantly different to their previous case, it can be reviewed as a fresh claim.

How long does that go on?

She rolls her eyes. “Forever basically. Even if they eventually get a deportation order, it’s mainly voluntary. Very few of them ever get sent home – the Home Office hasn’t got the resources or the willpower to do it. They just disappear.”

How many disappeared asylum seekers does Nicky think are in the UK?

 

“To be honest, I think it must be hundreds of thousands. Just based on the number of further submissions claims. And that’s without the initial asylum claims from people who were able to come over on lorries before Brexit, and they were mainly the ones who absconded because they just got out of the lorry and ran.”

Nicky claims they have tried to track down so many people who fell off the map years ago, but the trail runs cold at the last known address.

“Because we can’t find them it’s called ‘implicit withdrawal’. So that’s one way of improving the numbers, we’ve closed that case. And those numbers will be included when the government of the day says, ‘We’ve cleared this backlog’. In fact, they haven’t because the Home Office has implicitly withdrawn the asylum claim because we couldn’t find them, but the public will think it’s all sorted.”

Claims can be treated as withdrawn either because the asylum seeker explicitly says they no longer want to claim protection or implicitly if their actions – such as failing to attend interviews – are judged by the Home Office to amount to a withdrawal.

With new applicants, Nicky conducts an initial screening interview online. She says: “I ask nationality questions, via an interpreter, but there’s some migrants that, if they’re from a particular country, they’re not getting sent back no matter what.”

New high grant countries

Which countries does the Home Office say you aren’t allowed to send people back to?

“Afghanistan, Eritrea, Kuwait and Sudan at the moment. The ‘high grant’ countries used to include Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq. Eritrea is on the list because we can’t return anyone to a country with enforced military conscription because it’s against their human rights.”

Most Africans now claim they’re from Eritrea, Nicky says. “Because they know they’ll automatically get asylum. I’m allowed to ask them nationality questions. What is the capital of Eritrea? What is the flag of Eritrea? But it’s child’s play to Google those answers so...”

She throws her hands up in despair: “It’s a joke.”

The Home Office claims that there is no country from which asylum seekers are guaranteed to be allowed to stay in the UK. But the rates of approval for Eritrean, Syrian and Sudanese applicants between 2021-23 were all 99 per cent.

The conviction rate for sexual violence by nationality per 10,000 people shows Afghans at the top and Eritrean men in second place.

Has anyone in Nicky’s work said it is madness to grant automatic asylum to young males from those countries?

She claims: “Yes, of course. We all sit there and go ‘how come this is allowed?’ Before things went pear-shaped in Afghanistan, we had loads of Afghan claims and they were mainly all refusals. It was safe to go back to Afghanistan. Then, after the Taliban took over, we were given our refusals back and told we had to reassess. I always run the Police National Computer (PNC) check and the terrorist check (Warnings Index Control Unit, WICU). And the first guy I had to reassess, it came up that he’d been arrested multiple times for indecent exposure in children’s play areas.

“So I said, ‘I’m refusing. He’s a wrong’un’. And my senior manager said we can’t refuse an Afghan, we’ve got to grant. And I said I wouldn’t do it because a man who exposes himself in front of kids – well, where’s that going to end? And they said you’ve got to make the decision on the basis of the claim – he can’t be returned because he says he was politically active in Afghanistan against the Taliban. Just one anti-regime post on social media and he can say he’s politically active. But I still refused to make the grant, and I got disciplined for that.”

Why?

“Because I wasn’t meeting the requirements of my job. I was refusing that man because of criminal activity and because I believed he posed a threat to children, but he was never going to receive a jail sentence for indecent exposure, he was just getting repeated warnings. So they gave his case to someone else who was prepared to say ‘yes’.”

Nicky prides herself on being able to spot the genuine cases, even where they have been initially rejected and then appealed.

“There was a Bangladeshi guy who had previously been interviewed by a male decision maker, and he felt so ashamed of his homosexuality in front of another man that he said he was politically active instead.

“And then, years later, he comes back and he said to me, ‘I’m a homosexual’, and he completely broke down. In my experience, you can very rarely fake those emotions.”

Push to clear backlog

As the number of migrants entering the country illegally increases, and with the embarrassment that causes the Government, especially the so-called “asylum hotels” costing taxpayers nearly £6m a day, Nicky claims the pressure on caseworkers to get those men off the books is ramping up. But getting an asylum seeker “off the books” is a lengthy process, Nicky says.

“In the past, we would investigate a case thoroughly and often refuse them and they would appeal and then an immigration judge would agree with our assessment and reject their claim. But then, once the appeals process was exhausted, the applicants’ lawyers could move on to further submissions and that would string the process out even longer. If their claim was eventually rejected – we could be talking about seven to ten years living in the UK by that point – then the applicant would just abscond and go and work in a nail bar or a car wash.”

Or a migrant might claim he had fathered a British child and deportation to his country of origin would breach his right to a family life. Nicky says that she has spent hundreds of hours trying to check whether certain fathers have any contact at all with their putative children. 

She claims that when she started the job, caseworkers had “the most amazing training. On further submissions it was six months of training. It needed to be thorough so that, when anybody did go to appeal, our decisions were robust and sound, and the immigration judge would find on our behalf”.

 

No longer. She claims that since a push on clearing the backlog in December 2022, decision makers aren’t allowed to take their time and make quality decisions any more, she claims. “In the past, I would always say if I’m on the fence, it’s a refusal, unless someone can prove their claim. Even if I didn’t meet my targets, I knew I’d made a really sound decision, but we can’t do that now because it’s ‘get the numbers, get the numbers, get the numbers’. And those rushed decisions won’t hold up in a court.”

There are 19 decision-making units located across the UK with more than 6,500 staff. Major centres are in Croydon, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and Belfast. These asylum centres are coming under huge strain as politicians twig that public anger about immigration in general, and illegal migrants in particular, is tanking their electoral prospects. 

Staff are feeling “browbeaten”, morale is at rock bottom and stress-related sick leave is endemic, Nicky claims. But the Labour Government has promised to empty asylum hotels by the end of the current parliament in 2029, and Nicky alleges that this pledge is leading to corner-cutting on an alarming scale.

What happens when politics enters the equation

She has seen this kind of politically driven panic before, and makes an especially damaging allegation.

“In December 2022, Rishi Sunak said that he was going to clear the ‘legacy’ asylum backlog of 100,000 claims by the end of 2023. So all these decision-making units were set up to clear the backlog because it was an election promise. And that’s where the standard of training fell down because they just wanted bums on seats as quickly as possible.

“So they needed a lot of staff to do the initial asylum decisions. Teams from the Home Office went to different job centres around the country and people who were signing on, they got a quick 15-minute interview and the Home Office people said, ‘We’ve got a job for you’. Some weren’t even interviewed at all. They just applied online, and they were given the role. And then they had a matter of weeks training. So these new asylum staff, they were going to be making, in some cases, life or death decisions, and they hadn’t got the first clue.”

Hang on, Nicky, you’re claiming hundreds of completely random people were drafted in and were, with minimal training, put in charge of deciding who was safe to stay in our country?

“Correct. And the stress levels are awful because they’ve been thrown in at the deep end. We have people called technical specialists who are experienced decision-makers. There were hardly any of those. So the new people had nowhere to go to ask questions and they were like: ‘We don’t know what we’re doing.’ Even after they’d been there a year. And the team leaders were saying: ‘It’s terrible. You’ve got no idea how bad it is.’ But if anyone complained, we were told: ‘Get the numbers out! Get the numbers!’.”

The Home Office insists that the recruitment and training process was vigorous. Nevertheless, I ask Nicky, did she feel that there was political pressure to rush asylum approvals through?

She says: “God, yes, it was unbelievable. Huge pressure and targets. Back then, for a full-time decision maker, it was five decisions a week, and five interviews, and bear in mind some of the cases are very complex. But if you didn’t hit that target, there were threats of losing your job.

Nicky claims it takes half a day to grant asylum and several days to refuse.

“So people are granting because they are frightened for their jobs. And the technical specialists who do random checks on our work say they see loads of grants go out on a Friday because people are panicking to hit that week’s stats.”

Again, just so we’re perfectly clear, I ask Nicky, you fear that there could be an applicant who could have been a terrorist, a member of Islamic State, and their box would be ticked in order to hit a target?

“Yes, because the caseworker would be frightened for their job. If they hit their stats – 90 per cent or over – they’re under the radar, so they make sure they hit their target come what may.”

The Home Office says that it doesn’t prioritise speed or volume above high standards. But Nicky fetches her laptop and shows me an email dating from autumn 2023 which she says demonstrates the kind of shortcuts that were encouraged.

“People on the legacy backlog from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Syria and Yemen have been asked to fill out a questionnaire instead of having face-to-face interviews,” says the memo from the Home Office.

Nicky alleges that in practice, this meant thousands of illegal migrants could get away with making stuff up, giving them a golden ticket to stay in Britain, with no further questions asked.

She was right. I am shocked. Actually, I feel stricken that this is happening in our country. What Nicky has described is no less than the reckless endangerment of public safety by politicians and senior civil servants whose main concern seems to be clearing the asylum backlog – or at least pretending to – in order to make themselves look good rather than taking decisive action to protect our borders and deport migrants who shouldn’t be here in the first place.

A place for terrorists

Does Nicky believe that terrorists and criminals have been granted asylum in the UK?

“Of course they have,” she says, without hesitation. “Why wouldn’t a terror cell come over on a boat and say they’re from a high grant country? It’s the easiest way to get in. Terrifying really. It’s unsustainable, it’s dangerous, it’s got to stop before more people are injured or killed.”

We pause for a break and, as I walk through the cottage to find the loo, I see framed photographs everywhere of the three girls with their locks of fine blonde hair.

I can understand why their mother might fear they are at risk from migrants to whom she has been told to grant asylum, even though she knows for a fact they’ve exposed themselves and been arrested for indecent behaviour.

Nicky tells me: “The kids know what I do for a job and they think you should just let refugees in to be nice, but they haven’t got a clue what some of these guys are capable of. I’m not racist, Allison, I’m a realist. I’d feel the same if it was a gang of white men coming over on a boat from a country that has different opinions on women and children. Doesn’t matter the colour of the skin, it’s their culture. They’ve come from lawless countries where women are fair game if they’re not covered head to toe. And in the asylum service, we are not allowed to question them about misogyny or medieval attitudes that could hurt women and girls here in the UK.”

That threat is not hypothetical. In the week that Nicky and I meet, an asylum seeker from Sudan was convicted for murdering Rhiannon Whyte, a young mother who worked in the asylum hotel where he lived (CCTV captured him laughing and dancing); a Somalian asylum seeker who illegally entered the UK via a small boat in October 2024 was jailed for life for the fatal stabbing of a popular restaurant owner “without provocation or motive” (he was appealing his asylum claim); a Syrian asylum seeker was jailed for sexually assaulting a student in Cardiff; and there was been widespread outrage at the story of Ethiopian Hadush Kebatu who, eight days after he illegally entered the UK by small boat, sexually assaulted a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in Epping and the adult woman who tried to protect the child.

 

“It’s almost a daily occurrence now,” sighs Nicky.

It certainly is. In the first six months of this year, 339 court cases – including sexual attacks and violent assaults – involved a suspect who was a foreign national living in an asylum hotel.

 

According to Nicky, the pressure from the Labour Government to empty the asylum hotels before the next general election will only make things worse. She tells me that the target for caseworkers has gone up again in the last few months – from five to six asylum decisions and six interviews a week.

She says that this makes errors more likely while increasing the perverse incentive to approve yet more claims.

Nicky believes every home secretary she’s worked under has “lied and lied about the asylum situation”, although there is one exception.

“Suella Braverman understood what was going on with further submissions. These repeated claims that were a barrier to removal and she tried to stop them, she really did, but unfortunately, she never got that far because she lost her job.”

She says that delusion and deceit about our asylum crisis are found at the highest level. Recently, Sir Keir Starmer has taken to boasting that, in the period since he became Prime Minister, from July 2024 to June this year, 26,000 migrants have been returned to their home country.

“Typical smoke and mirrors,” claims Nicky. “They were mainly Albanians, and we have a returns agreement with Albania, but they don’t break it down. Only 27 per cent of those deported were asylum claimants – that’s just over 7,000. So where are all the others? Still in the crazy carousel going round and round.”

The light is draining out of the afternoon and Nicky and I sit there in the half dark as I try to absorb the implications of what she has told me. So many loopholes, so many lies.

The state actually thinks the safety of some migrants, who must not be returned to forced conscription in their home country, is more important than the safety of our children in their home.

“Bear in mind,” she says, “what we’ve been talking about, these are just the claims that are over 12 months old, not the most recent ones from the past year or the ones that keep coming in the small boats.”

“It’s mind-blowing, isn’t it? There are staff in my office, the women with young kids, and they cry about it. You know I’d really like this interview to bring about a change.”

I thank Nicky for her bravery in speaking out. Was there one case, I wonder, that compelled her to get in touch with me?

Yes, she answers.

She claims: “There was this initial asylum claimant from a high grant country – he’d been stalking young girls, he’d raped, beaten women up. We had to barrier the case, that means wait and see what action has been taken against him, if he’d get a prison sentence or not, but he absconded before that. He’s out there now.

“Get the numbers, get the numbers, get the numbers.”

This has to stop right now. Because, if it doesn’t, one day Nicky fears that she will turn on the TV news and there will be some man she has granted asylum to and he will have raped or murdered a young girl just like her girls, or your girls, or mine.

 

Home Office response:

A Home Office spokesman said: “We take all allegations seriously and are committed to addressing any concerns appropriately. However, we do not accept the characterisation of these concerns as presented.

“The integrity of the UK immigration system is paramount. We operate within a robust framework of safeguards and quality assurance measures to ensure that all claims are thoroughly assessed, decisions are well-founded, and protection is granted only to those who meet the established criteria.”

“We are changing the law so individuals convicted of sexual offences cannot be granted asylum in the UK.”

The Home Office denied that asylum caseworkers had to prioritise speed and volume and said standards of decision making were maintained through robust quality assurance measures.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/6aac9907edc0ca08