Foreign criminals who avoided deportation committed 10,000 offences in a single year, official figures show.
Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data has revealed that a quarter of foreign criminals went on to reoffend in the UK after being released from jail and remaining in the country.
Each of the 3,235 foreign offenders freed from jail accounted for three crimes on average, giving the total in the year to March 2022 of 10,012 further offences. That represented a rise of 25 per cent on the previous year’s total of 8,021 offences committed by 2,462 freed foreign criminals.
Over the four years of the data, released by the MoJ in a parliamentary question, foreign offenders were responsible for around 40,000 crimes. Offences ranged from murder to knife possession and drug-dealing.
As well as including criminals who avoided deportation, the data also included offenders who returned to the UK to commit their crimes after being deported.
The Home Secretary is required by law to deport any foreign criminal jailed for more than a year but has discretion to remove those jailed for under one year if such a move is considered to be in the public interest.
Rupert Lowe, the Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth, who extracted the data from the MoJ, said: “Everyone who commits a crime should be deported. Why are we tolerating this, particularly when we see the reoffending rates are so high?”
Mr Lowe also urged the Government to be more open with information on the amount of crime committed by migrants, including those who entered legally and illegally.
Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, has proposed legislation that would require the Government each year to present a report to Parliament detailing the nationality, visa and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts in the previous 12 months.
Mr Jenrick said: “Tens of thousands of offences a year would be prevented if the Government took a zero tolerance approach to deporting foreign national offenders. The public expects robust action.”
There are currently more than 10,000 foreign criminals held in UK prisons, accounting for some 12 per cent of the total, with Albanians topping the list, followed by Polish, Romanian, Irish and Jamaican.
Ernesto Elliott, a Jamaican criminal jailed for knife crime, went on to murder a 35-year-old man in a knife fight after being released from prison.
Elliott was due to be on a deportation flight on Dec 2 2020 after being convicted of knife crime, but he and 22 other serious criminals submitted last-minute appeals – including human rights claims – which led to them avoiding deportation to Jamaica.
The 23 criminals had been sentenced to a combined 156 years in jail. Their appeals came just days after 60 celebrities, authors and other public figures signed an open letter opposing the flight.
Elliott was jailed for at least 26 years for murder after the knife fight in a street in Greenwich, south-east London, in broad daylight. Onlookers who witnessed the bloody, eight-minute confrontation suffered “significant trauma”, police said.
In a second case, a Jamaican drug dealer who evaded deportation from Britain for a violent crime went on to kill a young woman in her own home. Lloyd Byfield, 48, was jailed for life as a judge expressed concern that failure to remove him from Britain had left him free to kill an innocent woman.
At least five dangerous criminals deported for crimes including firearms offences were jailed in the 18 months to 2022 after returning to the UK to continue to run their crime empires.
One Albanian gangster who sneaked back into the UK after deportation and lived freely for years was finally caught with two loaded guns and £70,000 worth of cannabis.
Mauricio Myftaraj was jailed for 15 years over firearms and drugs offences after police raided his home where they also found 40 rounds of ammunition, gunpowder, ball bearings and £20,000 in cash.
He was deported in 2015 and banned from returning after he was jailed three years earlier for a firearms offence. He managed to return illegally and continued his involvement in serious and organised crime.
Flogert Farruku, who was found acting as a “gardener” at a £60,000 cannabis farm, had previously been deported after being caught doing the same thing. He has now been jailed once more, and again faces deportation upon his release.
An MoJ spokesman said: “It costs tens of thousands to hold an offender in prison and since the new Government came into power, we have returned 14 per cent more foreign national offenders than in the same period last year.
“As the public would rightly expect, we continue to work closely with the Home Office to deport more foreign national offenders, keeping our streets safe and saving taxpayers millions.”
It comes as an illegal immigrant previously deported for a drug offence has been jailed again – this time for transporting £100,000 worth of cannabis around the UK. Armando Gjoka, 24, from Albania, was jailed for 20 months after he was caught by police who discovered 10 vacuum-sealed bags of the class B drug in the car.
