LONDON
\nBritain\u2019s new Labour government on Thursday said it had deported 46 people to Vietnam and East Timor, after ditching the previous Conservative administration\u2019s plan to send migrants to Rwanda.
\nHome Secretary Yvette Cooper this week said flights initially intended to fly undocumented migrants to the east African nation would instead be used to deport foreign criminals and immigration offenders.
\nThe chartered return flight, which took off on Wednesday and arrived on Thursday, is the first ever to East Timor and the first to Vietnam since 2022, her department said.
\n\u201cToday\u2019s flight shows the government is taking quick and decisive action to secure our borders and return those with no right to be here,\u201d added Cooper. Labour, elected in a landslide election win this month, has scrapped the Tories\u2019 Rwanda plan, which had been deemed illegal under international law by the UK Supreme Court.
\nFormer prime minister Rishi Sunak had aimed for the first flights to take off this month, after legislating to designate the African nation a safe third country.
\nCooper this week called the Rwanda scheme, intended to deter migrants making the Channel crossing in small boats from northern France, \u201cthe most shocking waste of taxpayers\u2019 money\u201d she had seen. The Tories had spent \u00a3700 million ($900 million) on the scheme but only four migrants had relocated to Rwanda \u2014 and they went voluntarily.
\nShe also told parliament Sunak\u2019s government planned to spend more than \u00a310 billion on the scheme in total.
\nLabour\u2019s approach is to prioritize returns of failed asylum seekers to designated safe countries to ease a huge backlog in the claims system.
\nIt also wants closer cooperation with European partners to \u201csmash\u201d the people-smuggling gangs behind the Channel crossings, which so far this year have seen nearly 16,000 people brought ashore.
\nVietnamese nationals accounted for 20 percent of undocumented migrants intercepted making the journey between January and March this year, Oxford University\u2019s Migration Observatory said.
\nIn March this year, Sunak\u2019s government launched a global social media campaign, aimed at Vietnam in particular, to deter people from using the route.
\nOn Wednesday, a gang of British people-smugglers were jailed after trying to hide two Vietnamese migrants in a hidden compartment of their campervan as they traveled between France and the UK.
\nEleven people have been convicted in the UK in connection with the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants who were found in the back of a lorry in 2019 after being smuggled from northern Europe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON Britain\u2019s new Labour government on Thursday said it had deported 46 people to Vietnam and East Timor, after ditching the previous Conservative administration\u2019s plan to send migrants to Rwanda. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper this week said flights initially intended to fly undocumented migrants to the east African nation would instead be used to deport […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420736,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-420721","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n