Asylum seeker demands explanation for ankle tag

The man said he felt he was "being penalised even halfway across the world”

An asylum seeker wants to know why he has to wear an ankle tag, given the practice has been deemed unlawful.

The 38-year-old is in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, after arriving in the UK from Trinidad in May.

A government pilot which monitored migrants using electronic tags ended in December and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the scheme "failed to assess privacy intrusions".

The Home Office said that "outside of the pilot" electronic monitoring was still used.

The Dunstable asylum seeker, who the BBC is not identifying, said he was originally deported to Trinidad in 2014 having been jailed in the USA for being in receipt of stolen money.

He said he was detained for his first 73 days in the UK and has been wearing the tag for the last nine months.

Wearing the tag made him feel "like a criminal", he explained, and added: “There is no-one else in the two accommodations I have been to that has an ankle monitor... I just feel like I am still being penalised even halfway across the world."

The man said he had tried calling and emailing the Home Office to ask why he was still tagged and added: "People look at you strangely; they want to know what have you done?”

'Long-established'

The ICO said that since August 2022, it had been in discussion with the Home Office about its pilot scheme tracking the GPS location of up to 600 migrants.

Its report concluded that the government failed to sufficiently "assess the privacy intrusion of the continuous collection of people’s location information".

The ICO issued an enforcement notice ordering the Home Office to update its policies and said "future processing" on "the same basis" would be breach data protection law.

The pilot was intended to test whether this monitoring was an effective way of maintaining contact with asylum claimants and an alternative to detention.

UK information commissioner John Edwards said: "We recognise the Home Office’s work to keep the UK safe... but they cannot take the same approach in the future.”

The Home Office said in a statement: “Outside of the pilot, electronic monitoring is a long-established practice and immigration judges in the First-tier Tribunal are allowed to grant bail with such conditions.”

It said all individuals "who were subject to electronic monitoring as part of the pilot have now been taken off".

A spokesperson said it would not comment on individual cases.