A convicted people smuggler found living and working in Leicestershire has been able to do so as a direct result of Brexit, according to immigration officers, who say the loss of an EU-wide data-sharing agreement has made it significantly harder to identify foreign criminal convictions among asylum seekers arriving in the UK.
Twana Jamal, once described as one of the most successful people smugglers ever caught and given a five-year prison sentence in France in 2016, was found by the BBC living in the UK under a false name. French prosecutors said Jamal, an Iraqi Kurd once known as “the godfather” of the French migrant camps, earned as much as £100,000 a week moving people across the Channel from Dunkirk between 2012 and 2016, charging customers between £4,500 and £5,000 per crossing.
Why Brexit is being blamed
Lucy Morton of the Immigration Services Union explained the specific mechanism at issue. “If we were able to share databases, even if just with our nearest neighbours, with Germany, with Belgium, with Holland and France, say, then yes, we’d know that they had a conviction for people smuggling,” she said.
Asylum seekers have their fingerprints taken on arrival and checked against UK police databases, but this process does not necessarily surface convictions recorded in other countries, since the UK no longer has automatic access to the EU-wide data-sharing systems it participated in as a member state. The BBC identified more than 20 active smugglers who have themselves reached the UK, some with overseas convictions, raising broader questions about the effectiveness of current screening processes.
What Jamal told the BBC
When confronted, Jamal said he was making “good money” in Leicester, describing his work as “moving cigarettes” from a warehouse. Asked about claims he had been driving without a licence, he reportedly said: “No one touches us here,” adding, “Even the police won’t stop you.” He claimed to have applied for asylum and to be “still waiting.” If that claim is accurate, he should not be working or driving under UK asylum rules, which prohibit employment and driving while a claim remains undetermined.
The Home Office told the BBC: “All asylum claimants are subject to mandatory security checks to confirm their identity for the purpose of immigration, security and criminality checks.” That statement does not directly address the specific data-sharing gap Morton describes, nor explain how a convicted smuggler evaded detection under those checks.
The wider polling backdrop
The story lands alongside new polling conducted by Merlin Strategy for the Independent, which found that 62% of people believe immigration levels have worsened since Brexit, against just 8% who think they have improved. This tracks closely with net migration figures showing 4.8 million legal migrants arrived in the UK between 2021 and 2024, a period shaped by specific schemes for Hong Kong and Ukrainian arrivals alongside demand for workers in shortage occupations, producing net migration of more than 2.5 million once departures are accounted for. Net migration has since fallen 48% to its lowest level since 2012 under the current government’s visa tightening.
Strikingly, the same polling found 55% of people now want a return to freedom of movement between the UK and the EU, against just 16% opposed, a finding that sits in some tension with public anxiety about immigration levels generally, suggesting the underlying concern may be less about EU migration specifically and more about the system’s overall capacity to screen and process arrivals effectively, an area where the Jamal case represents a concrete illustration of exactly that failure.
A pattern of screening failures
The Jamal case is not an isolated illustration of gaps in the UK’s asylum vetting process. The suspect in the Belfast knife attack was previously found to have been granted asylum under a fast-track Home Office scheme that staff internally referred to as a “grant factory,” raising separate but related questions about the thoroughness of vetting under pressure to clear backlogs quickly. Taken together, these cases point to a systemic tension between processing speed and screening rigour that predates the current government and has outlasted several changes in Home Office leadership and policy approach.
The political stakes
The promise to regain control of Britain’s immigration system was central to the original Brexit campaign and has remained a dominant theme in British politics for a decade since. The Jamal case complicates the standard political narrative on both sides: it is not evidence that immigration levels are simply too high, but rather evidence of a specific, technical capability, EU-wide criminal database access, that Britain lost as a direct consequence of leaving the bloc and has not replaced with an equivalent alternative arrangement.
Andy Burnham’s own approach to immigration and asylum policy, and whether his incoming government pursues closer cooperation with EU partners on data-sharing specifically, rather than simply the accommodation and enforcement measures currently under Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, will be one of the clearer tests of whether the incoming administration treats this as a genuine capability gap worth addressing through renewed EU cooperation, or continues to manage it through domestic enforcement measures alone.
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