UK plans facial recognition at transport hubs in sweeping immigration crackdown

The Home Office is preparing to put live facial recognition to work on immigration enforcement — and the scope is bigger than anything Britain has tried before. Policy papers show the department wants LFR cameras handling 'general immigration enforcement', including cases that are civil, not criminal. The project has already 'moved into the formal delivery phase'.

Officials laid out the plan in a guidance document published on 8 October, followed by a data protection impact assessment released later in the month. The cameras are pitched as a way to find undocumented people and settle their cases, which the Home Office says causes less 'disruption to the wider public' than repeated raids on homes and workplaces. Watchlists could reportedly include people who overstayed a visa without permission or entered without leave.

The groundwork is already laid. Between November last year and February, immigration enforcement ran three LFR trials at Holyhead port in north Wales, narrowly aimed at people travelling from Ireland through the common travel area who were breaching deportation orders or wanted for an immigration-related offence. Now the deployment map is widening to transport hubs and to 'specific' events that are 'expected to increase footfall at a location'. A list of higher-risk sites mentions places with 'heightened community sensitivity'. The Home Office declined to explain what counts as an event or a sensitive location.

The push follows Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's decision to double the immigration enforcement budget and grow its workforce by 60%, unlocking what she described as 'tens of thousands' more raids, arrests and deportations. The new policy bars anyone under 18 from a watchlist — a line drawn after it emerged earlier this year that the Home Office kept using an AI facial-age estimation tool it knew had misidentified child migrants as adults.

Campaigners are furious. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants said enforcement already 'persecutes and terrorises migrant communities', and spokesperson Griff Ferris called handing it a 'racist mass surveillance tool in public places' frightening. Sarah Lasoye of the Open Rights Group accused enforcement of giving itself 'the green light' without scrutiny, transparency or public consent, pointing to the absence of national legislation governing AI in the public sector. Both groups highlighted documented bias toward misidentifying people of colour.

The documents insist the technology is overseen externally, naming the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner and the Information Commissioner's Office. But commissioner William Webster told Liberty Investigates — which first uncovered the papers — that he was never consulted and that immigration LFR falls outside his remit. He said the spread of the tech into new service contexts raises real questions about how far existing regulation actually reaches.