Dozens of failed asylum seekers have been sent back to Vietnam and Timor-Leste in a UK first, the Home Office has said.
Some 46 people were returned to the South-East Asian countries on a plane which finished its journey at 9am on Thursday morning.
Funds earmarked for the previous government’s Rwanda scheme were used to pay for the flight, which was the first-ever to return migrants from Britain to Timor-Leste, and the first to Vietnam since 2022.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Today’s flight shows the government is taking quick and decisive action to secure our borders and return those with no right to be here.”
It comes as a British migrant smuggling gang, including a brother and sister duo, were sentenced for their part in a trafficking operation which saw people crammed into a dangerously small campervan crawlspace.
Border Force officers found two Vietnamese nationals concealed underneath a bed during a search of a UK-bound vehicle that was being driven by Natalie Sirrel in Coquelles, France on July 19, 2020.
Sirrel and her passenger Charlotte Smyth were arrested at the scene.
An investigation led officers to identify Alan Sirrell, Casey Dennis Loughnane and Benjamin Tokeley as further members of the smuggling gang, the Home Office said.
Alan Sirrell was jailed for three-and-a-half years at Canterbury Crown Court on Tuesday for conspiring to facilitate the commission of a breach of UK immigration law.
His sister, Natalie, received a two year suspended sentence, electronic monitoring and a £500 fine, and Smyth was given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty at an earlier hearing to the same offence.
Loughnane was sentenced to four-and-a-half years behind bars after being found guilty at trial of the same charge. Tokeley is due to be sentenced at a later date.
Stuart Wilkinson, from the Home Office’s North East Command, said: “Our teams will continue to work tirelessly to secure our borders and clamp down on the gangs who heartlessly endanger vulnerable people to make money. I am enormously grateful for the tireless efforts of the officers involved in this case.”
Ms Cooper scrapped the previous government’s plan to deport some migrants to Rwanda after Labour won the July 4 general election.
She said the Home Office would instead focus on flights returning foreign criminal to their home countries and tackling people smuggling gangs.
The latest flights come after the Home Office signed a deal with Vietnam to tackle illegal migration and visa abuse in April, under the previous Conservative government.
It included communication campaigns to discourage people from crossing the Channel in small boats and developing a “joint action plan” to combat human trafficking.
Officials said the agreement would “increase intelligence-sharing to tackle visa abuse” and “continue to facilitate the process for the return of those with no right to remain in the UK”.
