While the UK Government has been busy patting itself on the back over the deportation of Hadush Kebatu, it is important for it to maintain a degree of perspective over the small-boats emergency.
Let us not forget how this scandal started. Kebatu – an Ethiopian national - was arrested and subsequently convicted after sexually assaulting a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl and a woman who offered to help him draft a CV to find work.
He committed these sexual offences not too long after arriving in the UK – without official permission – by crossing the English Channel on a small boat.
After entering the country, he was rehomed by the British state in the three-star Bell Hotel in the Essex market town of Epping – a hotel which is located just a half a mile away from a Church of England coeducational school where teenage girls are a significant proportion of the pupil population.
This calls into question the kind of child-safeguarding assessments which are taking place - if at all - when it comes to the dispersal of illegal male migrants who originate from societies with vastly different practices, customs, and norms.
A deported migrant sex offender now has more money than one third of Britons have in savings - Rakib Ehsan
|Crown Prosecution Service/PA
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Kebatu’s sexual offences sparked protests not only in Epping but across the country – including parent-led demonstrations spearheaded by mothers who are quite rightly concerned by the impact of the small-boats emergency on the safety of their daughters.
Last month, he was sentenced to twelve months in prison. Under the Borders Act 2007, a twelve-month custodial sentence for a foreign national typically triggers an automatic deportation.
Indeed, the home secretary – currently Shabana Mahmood – has a legal duty to deport foreign nationals who have been sentenced to at least twelve months in prison.
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