While the UK Government has been busy patting itself on the back over the deportation of Hadush Kebatu, it is important for it to maintain a degree of perspective over the small-boats emergency.
Let us not forget how this scandal started. Kebatu – an Ethiopian national - was arrested and subsequently convicted after sexually assaulting a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl and a woman who offered to help him draft a CV to find work.
He committed these sexual offences not too long after arriving in the UK – without official permission – by crossing the English Channel on a small boat.
After entering the country, he was rehomed by the British state in the three-star Bell Hotel in the Essex market town of Epping – a hotel which is located just a half a mile away from a Church of England coeducational school where teenage girls are a significant proportion of the pupil population.
This calls into question the kind of child-safeguarding assessments which are taking place - if at all - when it comes to the dispersal of illegal male migrants who originate from societies with vastly different practices, customs, and norms.
A deported migrant sex offender now has more money than one third of Britons have in savings - Rakib Ehsan
|Crown Prosecution Service/PA
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Kebatu’s sexual offences sparked protests not only in Epping but across the country – including parent-led demonstrations spearheaded by mothers who are quite rightly concerned by the impact of the small-boats emergency on the safety of their daughters.
Last month, he was sentenced to twelve months in prison. Under the Borders Act 2007, a twelve-month custodial sentence for a foreign national typically triggers an automatic deportation.
Indeed, the home secretary – currently Shabana Mahmood – has a legal duty to deport foreign nationals who have been sentenced to at least twelve months in prison.
However, in what was a spectacular blunder of epic proportions, Kebatu was mistakenly freed by prison staff at HMP Chelmsford.
He was supposed to be transported from HMP Chelmsford to an immigration detention centre to be deported under an early removals scheme (ERS) for foreign national offenders.
Following a two-day manhunt, which only came to an end after a tip-off from a member of the public, Kebatu was re-arrested.
Following his deportation to Ethiopia, it has been revealed that Kebatu was given a financial incentive to leave after threatening to disrupt his removal from the UK – a payment of £500.
Removal teams handling deportations may decide to make discretionary payments to ensure the process runs smoothly, but it does suggest that Kebatu was not ‘forcibly’ deported and managed to secure money by being difficult over his deportation from the UK.
This will only reinforce the view that the British state is a soft touch when it comes to illegal migrants, to the point that the deportation of a foreign sex offender rested on their willingness to cooperate and the degree to which they are provided with a financial incentive to facilitate their removal.
Some may argue that £500 is not much money in the grand scheme of things. But it is worth noting that a recent survey found that one-third of the British adult public has less than £500 in emergency savings – with more than one in ten having no savings whatsoever.
To facilitate a deportation, the British state handed over an amount of money to an illegal migrant that a decent chunk of the British public do not have in savings - a foreign national who was convicted of sexually assaulting an underage girl after entering the UK without permission. That is no cause for celebration in my book.
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