Information released to Independent TD Carol Nolan by the Department of Justice has shown that the State is not keeping data on whether asylum seekers who arrived in the country without passports are still resident here – and that the total number who arrived with ‘false or no’ passports in 2022/23 came to almost 10,000 people.
In response to the revelation, Deputy Nolan said that “the Minister tasked with formulating policies to keep us safe, is utterly clueless as to how many such persons have remained within the state” – and that the immigration system seemed “designed to foster a lack of transparency”.
In the 2022-23 period, 9,859 persons described by the Department of Justice as being ‘Undocumented Arrivals’ or as ‘False Documents/Imposters’ arrived at Dublin Airport, the reply to Deputy Nolan showed.
This figure only captures arrivals at Dublin Airport, since “other airports and other ports of entry are the responsibility of the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB). Data on this subject is not available in respect of such other ports of entry,” the Minister for Justice previously said.
The Department also acknowledged that “the majority of those who present without appropriate documentation and are refused leave to land seek to enter the international protection process”.
However, the reply revealed that the state is not keeping data in a manner which allows them to identify the current status of asylum applicants who arrived without documentation.
“At the International Protection Office where full applications are lodged, information provided by applicants in support of their application, including documents concerning their identity, are recorded as part of the applicants file, but are not stored in a manner which allows detailed data to be extracted in the manner sought by the Deputy, including with respect to the current status of applicants who arrived without documentation,” the Department said.
The Laois Offaly TD had asked the Minister for Justice to provide data on the number of persons who arrived into the State with incorrect, false or no documentation and who subsequently claimed asylum for the years 2018 to date and the number of those who did so and are still resident here.
In 2022, 4,968 persons were classed as ‘Undocumented Arrivals’ while 832 were described as ‘False Documents/Imposters’, giving a total of 5,800 people arriving in that year with false or no identification papers.
In 2023, 3,287 persons were classed as ‘Undocumented Arrivals’ while 872 were described as ‘False Documents/Imposters’, giving a total of 4,159 people arriving in that year with false or no identification papers.
The Minister had claimed that her department recorded a 34% reduction in 2023 in the number of persons arriving in the State without the appropriate documentation.
However, when the increase in those arriving and classed as ‘False Documents/Imposters’ is taken into account, the reduction in that period is actually 28%.
Deputy Nolan said said that the reply was “further evidence, if evidence were needed, that the information deficits within our asylum and immigration system are simply abysmal”.
“Why is it, whenever challenging questions are asked, that the routine response is now either, “we have the data somewhere but we cannot retrieve it” or “we never collected the data in the first place”,” she said.
“We are talking here about persons who enter the state illegally and yet the very Minister tasked with formulating policies to keep us safe, is utterly clueless as to how many such persons have remained within the state”.
And she added: “The only conclusion we can draw from this is we have an immigration system designed to foster a lack of transparency”.
“The entire information system they have was clearly never designed either for the numbers, the level of abuse, or the kind of awkward granular detail a TD who wanted to ask relevant questions might ask,” she said.
Figures released to Mattie McGrath TD earlier this year showed that 13,521 people arrived in the State without documentation since 2018 – but that figure only covers Dublin Airport because data on this subject is not available in respect of such other ports of entry. It also does not include those arriving with false documentation.
The Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, said the Border Management Unit (BMU) and the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) are working closely with airlines on a range of measures to ensure that passengers have the appropriate travel documentation when boarding. Immigration officials are available 24/7 to assist airlines with queries in relation to immigration matters.
It had been claimed by senior political figures including Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman and an Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that fingerprinting and checks for criminal records are carried out when migrants claim asylum here.
But information released by the Department of Justice subsequently shown that no such checks against a criminal database are, in fact, carried out.
The information released clarified that the Irish authorities are not checking the fingerprints of asylum seekers against a criminal database – and that for the thousands of asylum seekers are arriving here without passports, taking their fingerprints and contrasting them against European databases will not reveal criminal convictions from their country of origin.
Security and safety fears have been raised repeatedly by local protesters, especially after it became known that thousands of those claiming to be asylum seekers had been allowed to enter the country without passports or documentation.
Protesters have described such asylum seekers as “unvetted” persons, but have been criticised for doing so by politicians and those working in the asylum field.