Child refugees are using people smugglers to cross the Channel in small boats to reunite with parents and other close relatives because delays in government family reunion processes are leaving them stranded in danger, according to a report.
Some children are waiting in conflict zones for applications for refugee family reunions to be processed by the Home Office, while others have fled to neighbouring countries. Many wait longer than the Home Office’s target of 12 weeks to process these applications. The backlog of family reunion applications in July 2023 was 11,000.
The report from two charities – Refugee Council and Safe Passage International – proposes simple changes which it says would help 1,000 people a year, many of them women and children, to reunite with family members.
The report states: “Ultimately, every child who turns to a smuggler to reach their family in the UK is a child who has been failed by our broken family reunion system.”
From January 2021 to August 2023, more than a quarter of the children Safe Passage International was supporting to reunite with family in the UK lost faith in the legal process and are understood to have used smugglers to cross the Channel in small boats. Charity workers say this applies to 12 out of 42 cases they worked on during that period.
The report calls for five changes, including:
• Amend immigration rules to remove the barriers to children joining refugee non-parent adult relatives in the UK.
• Amend immigration rules to allow refugee children in the UK to sponsor parents and siblings.
• Open a pathway to resettle the family members of people evacuated under Pathway 1 of the Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Schemeby June 2024, as promised.
One Syrian refugee in the UK applied through the refugee family reunion process to bring his son to the UK, but the wait was so long that the son ended up crossing the Channel and making an asylum application.
Enver Solomon, the chief executive of Refugee Council, said: “The UK’s failure to provide adequate family reunion routes has devastating consequences. We can all understand how utterly heartbreaking it would be to be trapped in a different country from our children or parents, with no way to reunite.”
Dr Wanda Wyporska, the chief executive of Safe Passage International, said: “The unaccompanied children we work with are alone, experiencing depression, PTSD, anxiety and even self-harming. They should be cared for by what little of their family remains. Without accessible family reunion, families are left in an impossible position: endure indefinite separation or risk their lives on dangerous journeys in the hope of being together as a family.”
The Home Office did not comment on the central claim in the report that children are using people smugglers due to failures in the family reunion process, but a spokesperson said: “We made one of the largest commitments of any country to support people from Afghanistan and so far we have brought around 27,900 individuals to safety in the UK, including thousands under our Afghan resettlement schemes.
“In October we committed to establish a route for those evacuated from Afghanistan under Pathway 1 of the Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme without their immediate family members to reunite them in the UK. We remain on track to meet that commitment and open the route for referrals in the first half of this year.”
