The government is not ruling out using electronic tagging to control migrants who come to the UK illegally.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman told Sky News she is willing to use a “range of options” in dealing with migrants who cross the Channel in small boats.
It comes after a report in The Times said the Home Office is considering fitting asylum seekers arriving in the UK via unauthorised means with electronic tags.
The paper said officials are looking at it as a way to stop migrants who cannot be housed in detention centres from disappearing.
Ms Braverman told Sky’s Jayne Secker: “We’ve just enacted a landmark piece of legislation in the form of our Illegal Migration Act – that empowers us to detain those who arrive here illegally and thereafter swiftly remove them to a safe country like Rwanda.
“That will require a power to detain and ultimately control those people – we need to exercise a level of control if we are to remove them from the United Kingdom. We are considering a range of options.
“We have a couple of thousand detention places in our existing removal capacity. We will be working intensively to increase that but it’s clear we are exploring a range of options – all options – to ensure that we have that level of control of people so they can flow through our system swiftly to enable us to remove them.”
Ms Braverman conceded the government may have to provide more detention places while it waits for the outcome of the legal challenges against the Rwanda scheme.