Britain Plans to Use Racially Biased AI that Pushes Refugee Children into the Adult System

The British government is preparing to use AI-powered facial analysis at the border, despite warnings that the technology is racially biased and could condemn refugee children to detention, removal and unsafe accommodation alongside adults.

Under the plans, facial age-estimation software will be used to assess migrants whose age is disputed. Critics have warned that black children arriving from conflict zones are particularly likely to be judged older than they really are and forced into the adult immigration system.

This isn’t a minor technical problem. In 2025, 755 children were incorrectly identified as adults on arrival in Britain, according to Home Office figures revealed by the Helen Bamber Foundation. The existing system is already failing hundreds of children. The government’s answer is to automate it.

Maddie Harris of the Humans for Rights Network described the technology as a “cheap process” that would reinforce existing Home Office decisions rather than make them more accurate. “This is not about protecting children – this is about shoring up the decisions that [the authorities] are making,” she said.

Even the government admits that the best available systems can have a margin of error of 30 months. For a child near the age of 18, that isn’t an unfortunate statistical gap. It can mean the difference between receiving protection as a child and being treated as an adult subject to detention and deportation.

“As soon as a child is treated as an adult, they are susceptible to – or exposed, rather – to any of the egregious consequences that the Home Office is applying to adults, such as detention and removal,” Harris said.

The errors won’t fall evenly. Children from Sudan, Somalia and other imperialised countries are already more likely to be “adultified” by border officials. War, hunger, dehydration, torture and exhausting journeys can all affect a child’s appearance. The system then takes the physical marks left by imperialist violence and uses them as evidence that the child deserves less protection.

In May, the government awarded a contract to Cognitec, a German company that calls itself “the face-recognition company”. An investigation by Lighthouse Reports later found that the company’s system tended to overestimate the ages of minors from sub-Saharan Africa.

The arrangement shows how the border regime joins state repression to private profit. A technology company gets a government contract, while refugees bear the consequences when its product fails. The state can then present political decisions as neutral technical judgments, hiding racist border policy behind the supposed authority of an algorithm.

AI doesn’t remove human bias from the system. It turns that bias into software, gives it a scientific appearance and allows officials to deny responsibility for the result. A child isn’t detained because a minister chose to make the asylum system harsher, the public is told. They were detained because the machine assessed their face.

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium has also warned that trauma can “age” a child’s appearance. Petra Molnar, co-founder of Migration and Tech Monitor, compared facial age estimation to colonial scientists measuring skulls and sorting populations into racial categories.

“The context really matters here,” Molnar said. “We know that trauma ages you. We know that malnutrition, dehydration, torture – even just the journey itself – has physical impacts on your face, on your body.

“It’s effectively ‘neo-phrenology’ by categorising people based on physical features,” she said. “Relying on these kind of imperfect tools is not the solution.”

The comparison is apt. Colonial rule repeatedly dressed racial domination in the language of objective science. Britain’s modern border system follows the same pattern, dividing people into categories of deserving and undeserving, child and adult, legal and illegal, before claiming these categories are simply discovered rather than politically imposed.

The Home Office insists that “Age assessments are a vital tool in maintaining border security.” But the language of security conceals whose security matters. Refugee children can be exposed to detention, deportation, adult accommodation and racist violence, while the state presents their presence as the threat.

These children aren’t arriving from nowhere. Many come from countries damaged by colonialism, war, sanctions, arms sales and the wider operations of the imperialist system. Britain helps create the conditions that force people to flee, then builds an increasingly brutal apparatus to keep them out.

Facial age estimation won’t make the system more humane or more accurate. It will help the Home Office process vulnerable people more cheaply, defend its existing decisions and distance officials from the suffering those decisions cause. The technology may be new, but the purpose is familiar: protecting the borders and privileges of an imperialist state at the expense of those its world system has already harmed.