#ProtectionNotPunishment - Tell the Government to stop criminalising migration

Since taking office last summer, the Government has made it increasingly clear they are continuing the trend of previous administrations by pushing through cruel migration policies that will harm people seeking safety and framing migration as a ‘national security issue’. 

This formed the backdrop for the Organised Immigration Crime summit on 31st March 2025, supported by far-right figures including Italian PM, Giorgia Meloni. The summit has merely reaffirmed that states fail to understand the root causes of irregular migration which forces people seeking safety to turn to intermediaries* or work without permission. 

Tackling this will come in the form of a new approach called Prevent, Pursue, Protect, Prepare, copied from CONTEST, the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy. This aims to prevent migrants from using intermediaries to travel, disrupt networks of intermediaries, including detecting and intercepting intermediaries at the UK border, and continuing to learn from and adapt this response. Our concern is that while this legislation is aimed at intermediaries, it will ultimately harm people seeking asylum by introducing offences for using an intermediary or by placing the onus of facilitation or endangering others on a person seeking asylum. 

*By ‘intermediaries’ we are referring to the people who facilitate the travel of criminalised migrants, also known as ‘agents’ or ‘brokers’, who the Government often refer to as ‘smuggling gangs’. For more information, check out the Migrants’ Rights Network’s Words Matter campaign