UK: Home Office under investigation over extracting migrants' data from phones

The UK Home Office is being investigated after immigration officers extracted data from hundreds of mobile phones seized off migrants who crossed the channel.

In 2020, migrants were told by officials to hand over their phones and passwords to immigration officers at Tug Haven in the Port of Dover - a facility that inspectors once described as “fundamentally unsuitable” and has since been closed. 

According to Home Office material seen by Sky News, officers extracted “location data, conversation history, photographs, etc."

Details released under the Freedom of Information Act said the cases of approximately 850 individuals were being investigated to see if the department broke privacy laws. 

Lucie Audibert, a legal officer at Privacy International, told Sky News: “Officially, the Home Office was using its search and seizure powers under the Immigration Act to seize the phones.

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"It was extracting data on the basis that it may reveal evidence of criminal activities such as people smuggling, not necessarily perpetrated by the phone owners themselves, but where they could find evidence that someone else had been smuggling people into the UK," she added.

One of the first of the questions to be answered by the Judicial Review, which revealed the data in a programme called Project Sunshine, was about the legality of the “blanket search and seizures”, as migrants are meant to be treated under the immigration regime and not the criminal one, Audibert said.

While the Judicial Review is expected to come to a judgement in the next few weeks, the migrants involved in the cases have argued that having their phones seized meant that they weren’t allowed to contact family members or lawyers to help with their asylum applications. 

In January, three asylum seekers brought a case to the high court claiming that Home Secretary Priti Patel operated a secret blanket policy to seize mobile phones and download data from people arriving into the country by boat.

They said that the policies were unlawful because they operated in a blanket fashion, were unpublished and breached human rights and data protection laws.

While a Home Office spokesperson declined to comment on ongoing legal proceedings to Sky News, they said: “We make no apologies for going after those responsible for facilitating dangerous Channel crossings.

“Not only are these crossings an overt abuse of our immigration laws but they also impact on the UK taxpayer, risk lives and our ability to help refugees who come to the UK via safe and legal routes. Rightly, the British public has had enough.”

The privacy case is one of 17 incidents that the Home Office reported last year to the data protection regulator, alongside the deletion of hundreds of thousands of fingerprint and DNA records that were wiped from police databases due to “human error”.

The case could also result in a £17m fine.