Immigration authorities in the United Kingdom have discovered that the number of adult migrants falsely claiming to be minors has reached a record high as more and more illegal immigrants attempt to exploit the additional protections afforded to unaccompanied minors who enter Britain.
According to the official figures, for the first half of 2024 alone, 1,317 migrants who arrived at the U.K. border disguised themselves as children. This eclipses the combined totals for similar cases from 2017, 2018 and 2019. (Related: Hungary pushes through with plan to bus illegal immigrants to Brussels.)
Among the asylum seekers found falsely claiming their age, 283 came from Afghanistan, 282 from Sudan, 236 from Vietnam and 140 from Eritrea. As unaccompanied minors are far less likely to be deported, age-dispute cases have surged, with 2,122 age-related challenges launched this year alone.
Officials believe human traffickers are encouraging adult men, often without proper documentation, to claim they are underage to increase their chances of receiving asylum, better housing, leniency in legal proceedings and avoiding deportation.
Labour Party Member of Parliament Dame Angela Eagle, serving as Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, confirmed in a statement that 20 percent of new arrivals in the U.K. falsely claim to be underage to "get a better deal."
"There is an issue about identifying correctly those who are children," she said in a Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Sept. 30. "About 20 percent of the people that come across in boats at the moment are claiming they're children. Not all of them are. And so clearly the signal has gone out that if you claim you're a child, then you're going to get a better deal. There are safeguarding issues one way or the other, if you let adults in the children's system, or children in the adults system, that we've got to try to sort out."
Afghan murderer claimed to be 14-year-old orphan to enter U.K.
The inability of immigration officials to detect these deceptions has led to deadly consequences. One such case involves Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, a 22-year-old Afghan national who had already committed two murders in Serbia before arriving in the United Kingdom.
Abdulrahimzai entered Britain in December 2019 by falsely claiming to be a 14-year-old orphan. He was placed in foster care and school in Bournemouth, Dorset, where he proceeded to harass young girls into sending him explicit images of themselves.
Abdulrahimzai was later convicted of fatally stabbing 21-year-old aspiring Royal Marine Thomas Roberts during an altercation outside a restaurant in Bournemouth in 2022.
Other high-profile examples include Parsons Green bomber Ahmed Hassan, who posed as a 16-year-old before detonating a bomb on a London Tube train in 2017, which injured 23 people. His true age remains uncertain, but the judge concluded that he was likely between 18 to 21 years old at the time of the attack.
In another notable incident, Iranian asylum seeker Siavash Shah was found attending a Year 11 class at Stock High School in Ipswich despite being significantly older than other people in his class. A student exposed Shah's age by sharing a photo of him online with the caption: "How's there a 30-year-old man in our maths class?"
In 2010, Iraqi asylum seeker Rabar Hamad attended secondary school and studied for his General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) despite being 20 years old, four years older than his stated age.
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