UK leader tells Interpol meeting world must 'wake up' to threat from people-smugglers

LONDON — People-smuggling gangs sending migrants across the English Channel in small boats are a serious threat to global security and should be treated like terror networks, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told an international law-enforcement conference on Monday.

Starmer told a meeting of the international police organization Interpol that “the world needs to wake up to the severity of this challenge.”

“People-smuggling should be viewed as a global security threat similar to terrorism,” he said.

Starmer, a former chief prosecutor for England and Wales, said his government would be “taking our approach to counterterrorism, which we know works, and applying it to the gangs.” That means more cooperation between law enforcement agencies, closer coordination with other countries and unspecified “enhanced” powers for law enforcement, he said.

Starmer said that in counterterrorism operations, “we can shut down their bank account, cut off their internet access and arrest them for making preparations to act before an attack has taken place.”

“And we need to stop people-smuggling gangs before they act too,” he said.

Starmer also announced plans to increase the U.K. Border Security Command’s two-year budget from 75 million pounds ($97 million) to 150 million pounds ($194 million). The money will be used to fund high-tech surveillance equipment and 100 specialist investigators.

Senior police and government officials from Interpol’s 196 member nations are attending the global police body’s four-day congress in Glasgow, Scotland. Starmer and British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper both addressed the meeting, calling for stronger international policing cooperation to fight drug trafficking and child sexual abuse, as well as people-smuggling.

Britain’s 2020 departure from the European Union complicated international cooperation on law-enforcement by taking the U.K. out of the bloc’s police agency, Europol. Starmer’s Labour Party opposed Brexit, but says it will not try to reverse the decision to leave the bloc.

Starmer said he is seeking a new security pact with the EU that would restore real-time intelligence sharing.

Like previous Conservative British governments, Starmer’s administration is struggling to stop thousands of people fleeing war and poverty from trying reach the U.K. from France in flimsy, overcrowded boats.

Europe’s increasingly strict asylum rules, growing xenophobia and hostile treatment of migrants are pushing many migrants north. While the U.K. government has been hostile, too, many migrants have family or friends in the U.K. and believe they will have more opportunities there.

More than 31,000 migrants have made the perilous crossing of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes so far this year, more than in all of 2023, though fewer than in 2022. At least 56 people have perished in the attempts this year, according to French officials, making 2024 the deadliest since the number of channel crossings began surging in 2018.

Starmer, who leads a center-left government, has raised some eyebrows in September when he visited Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni and praised her nationalist conservative government’s “remarkable” progress in reducing the number of migrants reaching Italy’s shores by boat.

Starmer argued Monday that “there’s nothing progressive about turning a blind eye as men, women and children die in the channel.”

The opposition Conservative Party argues that Starmer should not have scrapped the previous government’s plan to send some asylum-seekers who reach Britain by boat on one-way trips to Rwanda. Supporters of the proposal say it would act as a deterrent. Human rights groups and many lawyers say it is unethical and unlawful to send migrants thousands of miles to a country they don’t want to live in.

Starmer called the plan a “gimmick” and canceled it soon after he was elected in July. Britain paid Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds for the plan under a deal signed by the two countries in 2022, without any deportations taking place.

Former Conservative Immigration Minister Tom Pursglove urged Starmer to revive the Rwanda plan, telling the BBC “it’s a very serious failure not to have a credible deterrent in place."

On Tuesday, Brazilian police official Valdecy Urquiza is expected to be named the new Interpol general secretary, replacing Jürgen Stock of Germany. He will be the first chief of the Lyon, France-based organization not to come from Europe or the United States.

Interpol, which celebrated its centennial last year, works to help national police forces communicate with each other and track suspects and criminals in fields like counterterrorism, financial crime, child pornography, cybercrime and organized crime.