Hotels occupied by resettled Afghans cleared for small boat arrivals
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In order to make room for the newest arrivals, the British army's interpreters and soldiers have been ordered to leave.
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People arriving on small boats will be banned from work and claiming asylum under the bill. (AFP)
Hotel rooms previously held by Afghan interpreters and British army soldiers are being freed to shelter those who crossed the Channel in small boats, according to The Guardian.
UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has threatened to remove Afghans from hotels across the UK next month. However, The Guardian has been told that many of those rooms will still be paid for by the UK taxpayer as part of a 5,000-bed "buffer" in case of a surge in the number of people arriving by small boats this summer and autumn.
Ministers are bracing for an increase in the number of individuals crossing the Channel after approximately 13,000 people reached the UK earlier this year, most of whom are expected to be granted asylum. Last week, senior Home Office officials informed MPs that the department was paying for thousands of empty hotel beds designated for asylum seekers in order to avoid a repetition of last year's hazardous overcrowding at the Manston processing center.
About 8,000 Afghans were welcomed in May to the UK under Operation Pitting and received letters in Braverman's name informing them that they must vacate bridging accommodation.
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The government intends to utilize at least three hotels where Afghans have been ordered to leave – in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, and Chelmsford and Colchester, Essex – to shelter those who have arrived in the UK in tiny boats.
Afghan residents in all three hotels reported receiving eviction warnings for the next month. However, they claim that the Home Office has reserved at least some of their hotels for other new arrivals in small boats. Afghan officials say the development pits Afghan refugees against one another.
Peymana Assad, a Labour councilor of Afghan origin who worked closely with people evacuated under Operation Pitting, said, “Afghans are now at risk of homelessness come the eviction date and, what is worse, is that those coming on the small boats are eligible Afghan refugees or already have ARAP [Afghan relocations and assistance policy] acceptance letters."
“The government’s continued refusal to provide safe routes for asylum for Afghans as they did for Ukraine is what is driving vulnerable Afghans onto boats. What they are doing is effectively pitting Afghan refugees against Afghan refugees.”
Read next: 9,000+ Afghan refugees still stranded in UK two years after withdrawal
The director of the Conservative Friends of Afghanistan, who was a policy advisor to ministers after Operation Pitting, Shabnam Nasimi, said, “It is unfair and cruel that they are being asked to go to the back of the queue behind a cohort of people who come here in boats across the Channel," adding that “It is clear that the government is trying to find a way to deal with the small boats crisis. But this response is wrong and adds to the misconception that people who were invited here from Afghanistan are here illegally.”
According to the government, more than 24,000 people, including British nationals, have arrived in the UK from Afghanistan by December 2022. Over 21,000 of them have been resettled through Afghan refugee programs. The majority arrived as part of Operation Pitting, a British military operation that began in August 2021 to evacuate British citizens and Afghans from Kabul.
It is worth noting that while some are being resettled, around 200,000 people who worked with the NATO alliance occupation forces under former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled to Pakistan when the Taliban took power and are still helplessly waiting to be evacuated to the United States and other Western countries, putting a strain on the economy, according to Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, who spoke to US magazine Newsweek on June 17.
