London, March 14 Even as Home Secretary Suella Braverman defended her policy to remove almost all migrants who come to the UK without permission, a former government aide called it "cruel and heartless".
Nimco Ali, a one-time Conservative campaigner who stepped down last year, said Braverman's policies discriminate against war refugees of colour, The Guardian reported.
Ali, who had moved to the UK from Somalia as a child refugee, said the Home Secretary was "the wrong person not just for the Conservative party but for the country".
"The bill that Suella Braverman has put forward means that anyone like me who escapes from war and comes to the UK to claim asylum is a criminal," Ali was reported as saying in The Guardian. "The focus from Suella is on criminalising the victims, not the perpetrators of trafficking. Women who are trafficked should be seen as victims, but under this law, people who are trafficked would be criminalised," she said.
According to the bill put forward by Braverman, the refugees who arrive in the UK without prior permission will be detained for 28 days and that asylum claims will be deemed "inadmissible" whatever the individual's condition may be.
Ali, who came to the UK 32 years ago with her family, said they would have been criminalised if they had arrived under the planned legislation.
She had earlier said Braverman's "crazy rhetoric" on immigration left her no choice but to quit her advisory role last December, and she also accused Braverman of "vindictiveness" and a "lack of compassion".
Meanwhile, as the government faced stiff opposition from MPs across the House of Commons, Braverman in her defence said that her political opponents were "naive do-gooders" and there has been "too much" immigration in recent years.
"It's perfectly respectable for a child of immigrants like me to say that I'm deeply grateful to live here, to say that immigration has been overwhelmingly good for the United Kingdom, but we've had too much of it in recent years," Braverman, whose parents migrated to Britain in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius, was quoted as saying in media reports.
Last week, the UK Home Office said it had returned more than 320 foreign criminals and immigration offenders last month as part of efforts to stop the boats.
The people who were returned to their home countries included over 200 foreign national offenders, over 30 asylum offenders and over 85 non-asylum offenders, with more than 15 known to have arrived in the UK via small boats.
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