The British Home Office is detaining asylum seekers destined for Rwanda

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Home Office enforcement teams began detaining asylum seekers destined for removal to Rwanda in a “major operation” in the United Kingdom on Wednesday.

The department posted a video clip on X in which officers take people from their homes and lock them in vans to a soundtrack of electronic music.

“Our dedicated enforcement teams are working hard to quickly arrest those who have no right to be here so we can get flights off the ground,” Home Secretary James Cleverly said in a statement.

Rishi Sunak hopes the launch of his flagship policy to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda, after two years of operations being halted by legal and parliamentary wrangling, will deter migrants from crossing the Channel to Britain. The Prime Minister has made ‘stopping the boats’ one of five pre-election promises to voters.

Some 759 people have made the perilous journey since Friday, according to Home Office data, with the total number of people crossing in the first four months of this year already at more than 7,500, above the 2022 record.

The first arrests under the untested Rwandan asylum program come in a difficult week for Sunak, with his Conservative party expected to suffer heavy losses in local elections in England and Wales on Thursday.

Officials declined to give details of the operation, which they described as “large-scale”, or the number of people initially involved, but said arrests had been made across the UK.

Sunak said last month that the first flights carrying asylum seekers to Kigali would depart in July, months after he originally promised, and after the passage of the Rwanda Security Bill.

The controversial legislation designated Rwanda as a safe country for asylum seekers, contradicting a Supreme Court ruling last year, and limiting the scope for future legal challenges.

The Interior Ministry said it had increased immigration detention capacity to more than 2,200 places to accommodate people destined for removal to Rwanda. The department also had trained 200 new case workers to process claims quickly and had 500 escorts on hand to force people onto planes.

Commercial charters had been booked and an airport had been put on standby for the first flights.

Enver Solomon, director of the charity Refugee Council, said the start of the detentions caused “anxiety, fear and great fear among men, women and children who have fled war and persecution to reach safety in Britain”.

“Children are messaging our staff because they fear that their disputed age status puts them at risk of deportation to Rwanda. We have also seen a deterioration in the mental health and well-being of the people we work with in the asylum system,” he added.

Labor Shadow Immigration Minister Stephen Kinnock pointed to government figures suggesting the Home Office is only in contact with 38 percent of the asylum seekers it plans to remove to Rwanda.

Downing Street has said it is “not accurate” to say the Home Office is unable to locate the rest of the 5,700 asylum seekers it has identified to put on the first flights.

Questions remain over Labour’s immigration strategy, including how the main opposition party would deal with the tens of thousands of migrants living in limbo in Britain who are deemed inadmissible into the asylum system under current government policy.

Labor has said it would speed up processing but has not confirmed whether it would grant these individuals asylum seeker status.

On Wednesday, a Labor spokesman confirmed that while the party would block further removal flights to Rwanda if it came to power, it would not return to Britain asylum seekers already sent there by the Sunak government during the general election.

This did not mean that Labor considered Rwanda a safe country to send asylum seekers to, the spokesperson added.