British tabloid The Daily Mail in an investigation has found that illegal immigrants in the UK are being “coached” by numerous lawyers in Britain to fake as persecuted Khalistanis in India to justify their asylum claims.
Staff at solicitors’ firms readily agreed to help an undercover Daily Mail reporter posing as an economic migrant get refugee status.
This was despite being told he had no legitimate reason to stay in the UK after arriving on a small boat.
VP Lingajothy asked for £10,000 to invent a horrific backstory to use in the asylum application. This included claims of sexual torture, beatings, slave labour, false imprisonment and death threats that left him suicidal and compelled to flee to the UK, the newspaper reported.
The legal adviser promised he could get a doctor’s report to back up the story and produced antidepressants to be given to the Home Office as ‘evidence’ of psychological trauma.
In most cases they suggested the Daily Mail journalist, who was originally from India's Punjab, to pretend to be a supporter of a Sikh separatist movement banned in India – giving him grounds for asylum.
In two cases the solicitors, who charge between £4,000 and £10,000 for their services, invented elaborate fake stories to back up the claim, the daily tabloid newspaper reported.
One said he would scour the internet for extra information to bolster the concocted story and was happy to send the Home Office pictures of another man who looked similar to the reporter at anti-government protests in India.
There were 74,751 asylum applications, relating to nearly 90,000 people, in 2022 – more than twice the number of applications in 2019 – with just under half from people who arrived by small boat, The Daily Mail reported.
According to the publication, Tony Smith, a former head of the UK Border Force, called for stronger checks on ‘rogue solicitors’ who invent stories for immigration claims. He described it as ‘big business’ and said the legal representatives were ‘making profits out of other people’s misery’.
"Coaching people to tell lies to gain an advantage in terms of an application they are making is quite wrong, because we should really be working on a basis of integrity from the lawyers," he told Daily Mail.
"If we’re going to continue to allow lawyers to sit in on immigration interviews and represent immigrants in interviews about status, we need to be satisfied that they are properly accredited and that accreditation would demand a rigorous assessment of integrity," he said.
Alp Mehmet of Migration Watch, which campaigns for tougher border controls, said: "This is shocking. It is beyond belief that lawyers would pervert the course of justice by concocting stories for bogus asylum seekers and pocket huge sums by doing it."
The Khalistan movement is a separatist movement seeking to create a homeland for Sikhs by establishing an ethno‐religious sovereign state called Khalistan in the Punjab region.