At least 200 minors seeking asylum in the UK disappear from shelters

Around 200 unaccompanied minors – mostly Albanian teenagers – have disappeared from hotels where they were staying while awaiting a decision on their UK asylum applications. The situation provokes indignation from human rights defenders, who are calling for better protection measures and demanding that parliamentarians solve the problem.

The missing minors are part of the tens of thousands of people who have arrived in the UK in recent years, crossing the English Channel in small boats. Most young asylum seekers are accommodated in hotels while they wait for the Ministry of Interior to decide on their cases. The ministry says they are free to come and go, despite their age.

Citing conversations with local officials, some government officials say they believe many of those missing have been recruited by criminal gangs, raising serious questions about government failures. The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but confirmed the disappearance of at least 200 minors who had sought asylum and were staying in hotels. Opposition parliamentarians question the entire housing program for minors.

An investigation into a hotel in the Sussex region of southern England, published this week by The Observer newspaper, revealed that of around 600 unaccompanied under-18s who passed through its doors in the last 18 months, 136 were reported missing, while 79’s whereabouts remain unknown. Last year, data released by the government indicated that more than 222 unaccompanied children and adolescents who had applied for asylum were missing from hotels across the country operated by the Ministry of the Interior.

The government reacted to the widespread criticism in a series of statements issued this week. Robert Jenrick, the Immigration Minister, said that of the 4,600 under-age asylum seekers who have arrived in the UK since 2021, around 440 have disappeared, and only half of those missing have been traced. Local police are tasked with looking for the missing, but have only been able to locate a few of them.

Of the 200 minors who remain missing, most are older teenagers, but 13 are under 16 and one is a girl. The majority –88%— are Albanians.

Of the roughly 40,000 people who made the perilous crossing of the English Channel last year, 13,000 were Albanians. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government has vowed to crack down on this movement and reject asylum claims.

Speaking to Parliament on Tuesday, Jenrick found the reports worrying but said he had not seen any evidence that teenagers were being abducted from hotels.

“We don’t have the power to detain unaccompanied minors who seek asylum and find themselves in these places,” he said, acknowledging that asylum seekers are free to leave hotels. “We know that some of them disappear.”

In a heated speech to Parliament on Tuesday, Labor MP Peter Kyle, representing Hove, the area in which the hotel quoted in the Observer article is located, strongly criticized the government’s inaction.

“The uncomfortable truth for us is that if a child or teenager from the family of any of us present in this room disappeared, the world would stop,” he said. “But in the community I represent, one teenager is missing, then five are missing, then 10 are missing, then 60 are missing.” According to him, more than 70 disappeared and “nothing is happening”.

Speaking on the BBC Breakfast program on Thursday morning, Yvette Cooper, director of immigration policy for the Labor Party, said information about missing asylum seekers showed that the Conservative government had failed to take serious action to address the problem.

“There is a pattern present here, but nobody is investigating it properly,” she said. “There is no dedicated police force looking for these young people, saying ‘there is a pattern present here’ where young people are being trafficked from outside the country and then taken to cannabis plantations, or in some of the worst cases into prostitution, but throughout case for organized crime. They are being taken from these hotels.”

Due to the scarcity of temporary accommodation options, hotels have been used in the UK for years to accommodate asylum seekers. In July 2021, unaccompanied minors arriving in the country also began to be accommodated in hotels. The Ministry of the Interior is responsible for housing, but partners with private companies to provide housing and outsources program management to another company.

The waiting time for asylum applications to be processed has been steadily increasing in recent years, and at the same time the number of people accommodated in these hotels has been growing. Human rights groups criticize conditions inside these establishments.

The groups have specifically warned that hosting unaccompanied minors in hotels leaves some of the most vulnerable minors unprotected. They demand changes to the way the government processes asylum applications.

In an open letter, more than 100 charitable organizations asked the government to take action in relation to missing minors, demanding that the Ministry of the Interior stop housing children and adolescents “in hotels without security conditions, where they can be targets of criminals”.

Enver Solomon, director of the Refugee Council, one of the organizations responsible for the open letter, said in a statement that the government has an unequivocal legal duty to protect these teenagers, but that “it is not doing it. The equivalent of several classrooms full of children seems to have disappeared into the clutches of those who would exploit and subject them to abuse.”

“We know from our work that children who have experienced unimaginable horrors and upheavals and come to our country for safety are highly traumatized and vulnerable,” he said. “This is a minor protection scandal. City councils, police and ministers need to take urgent action to ensure that every unaccompanied child is respected and kept safe.”