A Home Office TikTok account posting footage of deportations and arrests set to dramatic music has been criticised for turning “brutality” into “clickbait”.
An account known as @SecureBordersUK was created on Tuesday with the slogan: “Restoring order and management to our borders.”
The primary 20-second video reveals individuals handcuffed and escorted on to planes, and raids being carried out to arrest unlawful employees.
It ends with a message studying: “And it’s simply getting began.”
The top of asylum advocacy at Freedom From Torture, Sile Reynolds, mentioned: “This authorities is clearly hooked on the low cost political factors it may possibly rating by turning the brutality of enforcement raids into clickbait on-line leisure.
“This model of political communication provokes the type of nervousness and concern that fuelled the summer time riots and the current violence directed at asylum inns.”
She added that caring individuals in the UK have been “more and more alarmed” by the authorities’s “performative cruelty” in direction of migrants and known as for ministers to focus on uniting the nation and use its TikTok account to “inform a extra hopeful story about our capability to welcome these looking for sanctuary in the UK”.
Imran Hussain, the director of external affairs at the Refugee Council, mentioned: “Solely a small proportion of refugees in Europe come to the UK.
“People who do come right here accomplish that as a result of they’ve current hyperlinks with the UK – like having household right here, talking English, or longstanding cultural hyperlinks.
“TikTok movies will not change this.”
The House Workplace has mentioned the account is aimed toward tackling on-line misinformation and to deter individuals from making the harmful crossing over the Channel.
The House Workplace has revealed figures exhibiting a file stage of arrests and visits in relation to unlawful working since present data started in 2019.
In 2025, 12,791 visits have been carried out, up 57% from 8,122 in the earlier yr, to companies similar to nail bars, automobile washes, barbers and takeaway retailers.
Arrests have been additionally at a file excessive of 8,971 final yr, up almost 59% in contrast with 5,647 in 2024 – the earlier highest level in knowledge revealed by the House Workplace.
Of these arrested, 1,087 individuals have been eliminated from the UK up to now.
Shabana Mahmood, the house secretary, mentioned: “There is no place for unlawful working in our communities. That is why now we have surged enforcement exercise to the highest stage in British historical past so unlawful migrants in the black financial system have nowhere to conceal.”
Chris Philp, the shadow house secretary, mentioned: “This is yet one more pathetic gimmick that gained’t work. The concept that placing some posts on TikTok will cease unlawful immigrants is laughable – identical to the authorities’s earlier gimmick to smash the gangs.”
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