Taxi driver shares tales of Home Office officials ‘letting go’ of potential asylum seekers
2 November 2022, 16:42
'They don't know where they're going'
“They don’t know where they’re going, they just know that they’ll sort themselves out and it’s not in Kent”, says a taxi driver who reveals shocking experiences of dropping illegal immigrants off at various locations as instructed by Home Office officials.
An LBC caller has told Shelagh Fogarty that asylum seekers are being “let go” by the Home Office, often without any warrant to be in this country.
Rizwan in Canterbury, a university student who drives taxis part-time, said he is sometimes sent to pick up asylum seekers.
“I’ve been told by people with Home Office lanyards or wherever they are, just drop them in London, no one cares, it’s fine, King’s Cross Station’s okay, or Victoria Station”, he began.
“On a couple of occasions there've been Afghans in the back of my car and we happen to have a common language…they showed me the paperwork, 'It says I’ve been declined, I’ve got no basis to be in this country' or whatever, but they’re being let go.”
“Hang on, what do you mean let go?”, Shelagh put in.
“Disappear into the wind, we haven’t got any space to store you”, came Rizwan’s reply.
“They don’t know where they’re going, they just know that they’ll sort themselves out and it’s not in Kent.”
Shelagh asked: “So they become illegal immigrants?”
The taxi driver explained: “Yeah, well, the government knows who they are, they just don’t know where they are.”
He said he’s driven Albanians, Sudanese, and Eritreans.
Rizwan continued: “A lot of Albanians - what’s happened is I’ve had them dropped off and straight away they’ve been picked up by someone in a BMW and they are and they’ve whizzed off.”
He explained that sometimes he has been asked to drop off asylum seekers at train stations, and other times it has been at a hotel, but he told Shelagh he is not obligated to check if they enter it.
“If they want to go into the hotel or they want to disappear, that’s up to them”, he said.
Rizwan shared another story where he had a job taking someone to a hospital in London from a hotel housing Afghans.
Despite being there so many times, he said: “After a couple of minutes it occurred to somebody that hang on, this guy that’s been let in, we didn’t check his ID, we didn’t jot down his number plate!
“So then the manager started shouting at all the agency staff, 'How could you let that happen, there’s been an attack!'”, he said, referring to the recent petrol bomb attack at the migrant processing centre in Dover.
He said that there could be an element of “the government doesn’t care”.
Shelagh said in reflection: “It sounds from what you’re saying that Home Office officials at some level are deliberately placing people into our communities knowing them to now be illegal immigrants…making them illegal immigrants essentially.”
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