Mercy Muroki: Government’s failure on immigration is a ticking time bomb

It's being reported in The Times this morning that court documents obtained by the paper reveal that Liverpool suicide bomber Emad al-Swealmeen had his asylum claim rejected by a judge on SEVERAL grounds almost seven years before his attack.

Al-Swealmeen, if you remember, got into a taxi on Remembrance Sunday of last year, strapped full of explosives and ordered the driver to drop him off at the Liverpool Women's Hospital – his suspected target.

However, by somewhere between a sheer stroke of luck and divine intervention, the bomb denotated just OUTSIDE the hospital, killing nobody but Swealmeen himself – with the taxi driver managing to escape just seconds before the car blew up.

The Times claims that Swealmeen was found to have told several lies to stay in Britain, including lying about where he was from, his family background, the risk he faced if he returned to his home.

On top of this, Swealmeen converted from Islam to Christianity in a suspected bid to have his asylum claim looked more favourably upon.

Now – this poses a whole host of questions around our inept immigration system.

If we can't deport people who have been proven to be lying about who they are and why they're in the country, what on Earth is the point of an asylum process?

According to the government's own figures in a policy statement published last month, as of 2020:

Around 42,000 failed asylum seekers are still living in the UK despite having their asylum claims refused.

The number of enforced returns have also fallen year on year over the last decade or so.

To make it worse:

10,000 Foreign National Offenders have been released back into the community because they apparently cannot be returned to their country of origin.

The longer the Home Office and our judicial system keeps failing to enforce the law of the land and deport people who are OBVIOUS red flags, like Swealmeen, the less kindly people might look on immigrants in general.

And this impacts on immigrants like me, my family, millions of other families who are law abiding, who pay our taxes, who make positive contributions to the country.

The government's failure on immigration is a ticking time bomb. And I don't want be around when it all blows up.