Nearly 100 children were wrongly classified as adults and placed in immigration detention under Shabana Mahmood’s “one in, one out” deal with France.
Between 15 August 2025 and 1 May 2026, officials disputed the ages of 304 people detained through the scheme. Of these, 94, almost one in three, were eventually found to be children.
Children are meant to be excluded from the scheme altogether. Even when an unaccompanied child enters immigration detention, government policy limits their detention to 24 hours. Yet in two cases observed by the independent monitoring board at Heathrow, officials took at least 40 days simply to carry out an age assessment.
These aren’t minor administrative mistakes. They’re the predictable result of a border regime built around suspicion, punishment and deportation. When the capitalist state sees migrants primarily as a threat to be managed, children become acceptable collateral damage.
The figures, first disclosed in The Guardian, appeared in a letter from Jane Leech, interim chair of the independent monitoring boards, to Home Office minister Anna Turley.
Leech wrote: “Your officials have informed the IMB that 304 age disputes have taken place between 15 August 2025 and 1 May 2026, of which 94 (31 percent) were assessed to be children.
“The IMB is therefore concerned that child safeguarding mechanisms are ineffective, and believes more should be done to ensure that those whose age is under dispute are not detained in the first place.”
The deal, known inside the Home Office as Operation Hillmore, allows Britain to deport some people arriving by small boat to France. In exchange, Britain accepts the same number of people from France if the state decides that they have a legitimate asylum claim.
Even its name — “one in, one out” — reveals the ruling-class mentality behind it. Human beings fleeing war, persecution and poverty are reduced to interchangeable units on a government ledger. Their histories and needs matter less than the opportunity to perform toughness for the press.
Leech said the scheme was “placing highly vulnerable, newly arrived individuals, including children and survivors of abuse, in detention”.
Many detainees were already suffering severe psychological distress. “Many of those who have recently arrived present as psychologically distressed, and Boards have observed records and heard testimonies showing that many are survivors of torture and abuse,” she wrote.
Some were separated from relatives with whom they had travelled. Others were prepared for removal despite suffering from tuberculosis or requiring hospital treatment. One person was transferred from Manston to a Gatwick immigration removal centre with tuberculosis. Another was in such a critical condition that Brook House refused to admit them and sent them directly to hospital.
People have also been held far longer than the government’s own supposed limits. Detention beyond 28 days was meant to occur only in exceptional cases, yet some people waited more than six months for deportation. One man was detained for 27 weeks.
This is how the bourgeois state operates. It claims to be bound by careful procedures, safeguards and individual rights, but these protections become remarkably flexible when applied to people with little money, uncertain legal status and no political power. The same state that pleads helplessness before landlords, arms companies and corporate monopolies suddenly becomes ruthlessly efficient when locking up a frightened child.
Britain and France aren’t innocent observers of global displacement. They’re old imperial powers whose ruling classes continue to profit from an international system based on military intervention, arms sales, debt and unequal exchange. People are driven from their homes by conditions that imperialism helps create, then punished when they arrive at the borders of the imperial core.
The border regime also serves a domestic class purpose. By presenting migrants as the cause of pressure on housing, wages and public services, the ruling class directs anger away from employers, landlords and privatisation. British-born and migrant workers are encouraged to see one another as competitors while capital exploits both. National chauvinism breaks working-class solidarity and leaves the people actually responsible for social misery safely out of sight.
Government figures show that 1,087 people were returned to France under the deal between 4 August 2025 and 30 June 2026. During roughly the same period, 27,920 people arrived in Britain by small boat. The scheme’s practical impact is dwarfed by its political role. It gives ministers a deportation spectacle through which they can advertise the coercive power of the state.
Faced with evidence that its system detained scores of children as adults, the Home Office offered more technology.
A spokesperson said: “Robust age assessments are essential to maintaining the integrity of our border and ensuring migrants receive appropriate safeguarding and access to services.
“We will continue to strengthen and modernise this process, including through the rollout of cutting-edge AI technology from next year to support age assessment.”
Technology can’t remove the class purpose of the system using it. Under capitalism, artificial intelligence won’t stand above the border regime as a neutral judge. It’ll be another instrument placed in the hands of the same officials, serving the same policy of exclusion and detention while giving political decisions a scientific-looking cover.
As Solidarity Post has previously reported, the Home Office plans to introduce facial age-estimation software at the border from 2027. An investigation by Lighthouse Reports found that technology supplied by German company Cognitec tended to overestimate the ages of minors from sub-Saharan Africa. Even the best available systems can be wrong by 30 months. For a 16- or 17-year-old, that gap can mean being stripped of child protections and pushed into adult detention and deportation procedures. The government isn’t fixing the machinery that locked up these 94 children. It’s preparing to give that machinery an algorithmic rubber stamp.
The racial bias follows the map of imperialism. Children from Sudan, Somalia and other imperialised countries can arrive carrying the visible effects of war, hunger, dehydration, torture and exhausting journeys, all of which may make them appear older. The software takes damage produced by this world system and turns it into evidence against its victims. That’s colonial classification in modern dress: a private company profits from measuring racialised faces while the imperialist state uses the result to make repression look objective.
The scandal doesn’t show a fundamentally humane system suffering a handful of unfortunate errors. It exposes the system’s real priorities. A child can spend weeks behind the walls of a detention centre while officials decide whether they count as a child. A sick person can be prepared for deportation. A family can be split apart. Operation Hillmore is class rule at the border: merciless toward the displaced and silent about the imperialist order that displaces them.
