I’m an ex-Border Force boss whose hauled migrants out of Channel

BRITAIN could stop the boats by the end of the year if the government takes a controversial “hardball” approach, according to the former Border Force boss.

The total number of English Channel crossings last year was at a three-year high – with Labour accused of giving such arrivals the “gift of open borders”.

A total of 41,472 migrants made the perilous crossing in 2025, well up from 35,816 in 2024 and the 29,437 in 2023.

It was nine per cent below 2022’s high of 45,774.

Under the so-called one-in one-out deal agreed with France in August, 193 migrants were sent back and 195 arrived.

Tony Smith, the ex-Director General of the UK Border Force – the Home Office‘s law enforcement on the border, has laid out his plan for nullifying migrant chaos, which has continued to ramp up since 2018.

He claims without drastic action the UK’s migrant crisis could spiral out of control – with evil smugglers sending even more men, women and children on high risk journeys to the UK from France via the Channel.

He said it’s likely further records would have been broken for the number of crossings this year if not for the bad weather in November and December which saw boats being blown out of the water before leaving France.

“Unless we get some significant change over what we’ve been getting over the last seven years this will continue – it needs something drastic,” Mr Smith told The Sun.

He added: “You’ve got to be tough and you’ve got to detain and deport.”

He said a “removals strategy”, which would mean deals similar to the 2023 Albania agreement, which allows those coming from the Balkan nation to be fast-tracked back – must be reached with other “safe” countries like Vietnam, Pakistan, Turkey and India.

Mr Smith said: “These countries are not renowned for persecuting people – that’s how we got the Albania deal, they guaranteed they won’t persecute anybody.”

He added: “That means some pretty heavy arm twisting in foreign policy to say you will take your own people back and if you don’t we will consider sanctions against you.”

Mr Smith suggested visa, finance or overseas aid sanctions should be threatened.

While with category A countries, including Afghanistan and Syria, “you’d need a safe option”, which he says should see the reintroduction of the Rwanda plan or something similar – which would see asylum seekers arriving in the UK sent to Rwanda detention centres for their claims to be processed.

However, he said “there’s so much opposition” to Rwanda-style legislation, which was officially scrapped in December 2025 after Labour declared it “dead and buried” on its first day in office in July 2024.

“The last government were on the right lines with Rwanda but they weren’t bold enough,” Mr Smith said.

 “If you want to fix this you need a really upfront political leader, someone like Tony Abbott in Australia who did what Donald Trump’s doing now in the US.

“Someone saying – no, sorry, I am here to serve the British people and I’ve had enough of this, and I’m going to close the border and I’m not going to let people in here to claim asylum and I’m going to send these people back to these countries and if they want to play hard ball with me I’m going to play hard ball with them.

“And they’ve really turned it round in the States.”

It would also mean building more detention centres here so that the onus can “switch from immigration bail to detention”, with Mr Smith adding: “The message must be you’re going to be locked up, you’re not going to be allowed into communities, you’re not going into hotels, you won’t cause mischief because you’re going to locked up.”

However, Mr Smith said he “can’t see that happening” in the UK, due to our parliamentary system, and judicial system “which takes too much time”.

“The key to effective border control is you’ve got to remove them quickly, don’t hang around for months or years, just get on with it,” he added.

Unpicking the law

Mr Smith went on to say, the UK could resolve the issue in as little as a year – but first it must get out of the European Convention on Human Rights – Article 3 of which prevents Britain automatically sending people claiming asylum back home.

And from there “you can unpick” the Human Rights Act 1998, which enshrines the ECHR into British law, and reinterpret the 1951 Refugee Convention – which he says is outdated.

This will allow us to invoke Article 31.1 of the UK-France ‘Dangerous Journeys’ Agreement which allows the UK to automatically return certain asylum seekers to France.

To leave the ECHR, the UK would have to formally notify the Council of Europe of its intention to withdraw with six months’ notice.

The move would also need the approval of Parliament.

Mr Smith said the message must be: “If you’re clearly identified as someone who’s come off a boat from France you cannot claim asylum in this country.”

He said Britain has spent long enough negotiating with their European neighbours, who can “stop the boats overnight but refuse to”, with migrants taking advantage of legal loopholes meaning once they’re in British territory they must be collected by Border Force vessels and brought to the UK.

“Asylum effectively trumps border control,” he continued. “Once they’ve mentioned the magic word they’re in.

“All they’ve got to say is they’re in fear of persecution or I’m worried about their human rights from wherever I’m from, you can’t send me back.

“Our hands are tied.”

Mr Smith said in 2012 – while he was serving as the Gold Commander for the UK Border Agency during the London Olympics, he was assured by maritime experts that migrants crossing the Channel was essentially impossible.

“I was told currents were too strong, the shipping lanes were too busy and it just would not be possible for anyone to get across there on a small boat,” he explained.

He retired the following year and said by 2018, once crossings started to become a regular issue, he added: ” I was as surprised as everybody else.

“I thought it must be a bit of a freak that a few people managed to make it.”

During Mr Smith’s career with the Home Office, he said they were “tightening up” on the border controls in Calais and Dunkirk which indirectly led to the boat crossings.

He explained. “I was over there quite a lot myself – we did spend a lot of time building fences around those ports and the Channel Tunnel to stop migrants, and Border Force had search zones in France where we could check lorries and passports ourselves.”

Mr Smith said the irony was, migrants found it so difficult getting to the UK illegally via lorries, trains, ferries and the airports, suddenly the highly dangerous small boat crossings became the only option.

“I always thought there was a possibility because if they moved to the beaches, there’s nothing we can do – I was just told simply don’t worry about it,” he added.

‘You’ve got to detain and deport’

Asked if Britain risks shutting itself off from the world and damaging its reputation with such aggressive tactics – after all the 1951 Refugee Convention was introduced on the back of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany – Mr Smith said “you’ve got to be tough”, and such laws are now not fit for purpose in modern times.

He said the UK’s strategy for the last 40 years “has been to stop people getting in” through various strategies.

“We knew once they’re here they’ll do what the boat people are doing – so over the decades we’ve managed to keep asylum intake down,” he explained, having began work for the Home Office in the 1980s.

He said if the UK began handing out asylum visas there are around 100 million people who are already displaced, and “millions more will apply saying they fancy moving to the UK”.

“We’d be completely overrun with applications – how would you decide who qualified and who didn’t?

“And even if you introduced something like that, disappointed applicants who were denied are going to come by boat anyway.”

Mr Smith said to do our part for the refugee problems around the world, we should “resurrect” the UNHCR Refugee Scheme, which identifies highly vulnerable refugees facing immediate danger or specific needs – for example torture survivors, or at-risk women or children – and refers them to safe countries like the UK.

Mr Smith said: “There are already a lot of people under the care of UNHCR, living in camps in places like Turkey who are genuinely fleeing persecution, who are already refugees.

“We will do our bit, we will take 10, 20, 30 thousand. We will select them with the UNHCR Resettlement Programme and we will bring them here and put them through an integration programme so we can resettle in our community.

“That’s the way to deal with safe and legal routes.

“Apart from where you get another Ukraine or Hong Kong, an event where you’re responding to a world crisis where you’ve got to do your bit.”

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has previously said she would pull Britain out of the ECHR if she is elected.

Ms Badenoch said: “It is time for Britain to leave the ECHR.

“It is clear that it is necessary to protect our borders, our veterans and our citizens. I have always been clear that we should leave the ECHR, if necessary, but unlike other parties we have done the serious work to develop a plan to do so, backed by legal advice.”

Meanwhile Sir Keir Starmer is against leaving but is ready to change the way the ECHR is applied to enable the Government to deport more foreign criminals.