More than 1,100 people — including survivors of torture and human trafficking — have been convicted of illegally arriving in the UK since 2022, according to freedom of information data obtained from the Home Office by Dr Victoria Taylor, a criminologist and research fellow at the University of Manchester. The data reveals that 1,109 people were prosecuted for the offence of illegal arrival between July 2022 and January 2026 The Guardian.

The Home Office created the offence of illegal arrival in 2022 to deter people from coming to the UK by small boat or by other irregular means, such as hiding in lorries. This offence is distinct from the separate offence of facilitation — the legal term for helping someone enter a country illegally, typically for profit. Crown Prosecution Service guidance covers both illegal arrival and entry into the UK, as well as the facilitation of illegal entry or arrival Crown Prosecution Service. The framework was expanded by the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which changed the law so that people who arrive in the UK illegally will not be able to stay and will instead be detained and then removed, according to the government's overarching factsheet for the bill UK Government.

Of those prosecuted for illegal arrival, 628 arrived on a small boat. Of those, 296 were captured on surveillance drone footage steering a dinghy. Just 12 people have been convicted of the separate offence of facilitation after steering the dinghies they arrived on The Guardian.

In one illegal arrival case, the Home Office settled a judicial review — a legal challenge in which a court examines whether a government decision was lawful — relating to a trafficking survivor from South Sudan who was forced at gunpoint to pilot a small boat. The department agreed to ensure greater protection for trafficking victims in such cases. At least 30 age-disputed children were also among those convicted of the various offences. Nineteen of those children had spent time in adult prisons The Guardian.

The broader context for these prosecutions is a sustained period of high unauthorised arrivals. UK authorities recorded around 264,000 unauthorised arrivals between 2018 and 2025, of which 73 per cent arrived after crossing the Channel The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford. In 2023, 29,437 migrants arrived illegally in the UK in small boats, around 36 per cent lower than the previous year, according to provisional government figures Reuters. In April 2023, the UK government said it would set out measures to limit courts' ability to block the deportation of illegal migrants Reuters. Concurrently, people smugglers are directing migrants to pay for illegal Channel crossings using a network of UK-registered businesses, according to a BBC investigation BBC.

What this means for policy and practice is a complex interplay between deterrence mechanisms and vulnerability identification. The prosecution of over a thousand individuals for the act of arrival itself — rather than for organising or profiting from crossings — points to the operational reach of the 2022 offence. The low number of facilitation convictions, just 12, raises questions about whether resources are directed at the right targets, and whether the evidentiary thresholds (the level of proof required to secure a conviction in court) are too high to catch the architects of the crossings rather than those being transported.

The inclusion of torture and trafficking survivors among those convicted is a critical dimension. The South Sudanese judicial review settlement indicates that the intersection between coercion and criminality remains a live legal concern. The placement of at least 30 age-disputed children into the criminal justice system, with 19 spending time in adult prisons, highlights the ongoing challenges in age assessment and the safeguarding of minors within immigration enforcement frameworks.

For practitioners and policymakers, the data obtained by Dr Taylor provides a quantitative baseline for evaluating the impact of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and related enforcement measures. The divergence between small boat arrivals, prosecutions for illegal arrival, and convictions for facilitation will likely inform future debates on the effectiveness and collateral impacts of the UK's approach to irregular migration.