UK’s new interior minister Yvette Cooper has launched the process of launching a new Border Security Command to tackle illegal immigration, News.Az reports citing BBC.
The British government hopes the new agency “will reduce small boat crossings in the English Channel,” the BBC report says.
On Sunday, the minister, whose party recently won the last parliamentary election, said she was beginning the groundwork to establish the border command body to ensure “we can get the new commander and new cross-border police in place in order to strengthen Britain’s border security.”
The new commander “would draw together the work of intelligence agencies, police, Immigration Enforcement and Border Force,” says the BBC report citing information from the U.K. interior ministry.
The plans for a new border security agency follow Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s statement on Friday that the previous scheme — the Rwanda plan — to deter small boat crossings would be scrapped.
A brainchild of the former ruling Conservative party, the Rwanda asylum plan, first announced in 2022, aimed to send migrants who arrived illegally in the U.K. to the African country, believing it would act as a deterrent against the crossings.