Lawyers have been caught telling illegal migrants to fabricate horror stories about life back home, fake medical records, or even pretend to be gay in order to gain asylum in Britain. According to an undercover investigation by the Daily Mail, several law offices have been actively undermining the asylum system in Britain by teaching illegal migrants how to trick immigration officials with fake backstories about the hardship in their homelands to increase their chances of being granted refugee status.
The Mail reports: Lawyers are charging thousands of pounds to submit false asylum and human rights claims for illegal immigrants.
Staff at solicitors’ firms readily agreed to help an undercover 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 back story 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 legal adviser promised he could get a doctor’s report to back up the story and produced anti-depressants to be given to the Home Office as ‘evidence’ of psychological trauma.
At another firm a lawyer said he would have to ‘create the evidence’ to make it appear the reporter had a genuine fear of ‘persecution and assassination’ if he returned home.
He boasted of a success rate of more than 90 per cent with similar asylum cases. A third outlined the ‘fine ingredients of an asylum case’ he said he would use to make it appear the reporter feared for his life in India. This could include anti-government political allegiances, a love affair with someone from the wrong caste or being gay.
Two said they would falsely claim the Mail’s reporter was a ‘victim of human trafficking’ who had been fleeced, betrayed and abandoned by people smugglers.
Many of the law firm staff enjoy wealth and prestige, including Mr Lingajothy who owns a multi-million pound property empire with his wife, drives a BMW with personalised number plates and sent his son to Eton.
But while immigrants face jail for making false asylum claims, solicitors who encourage, facilitate and profit from them merely face professional sanctions.
One law firm sacked the representative the Mail spoke to and closed one of its offices after we revealed our findings. It said his actions breached the law and broke the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s code of conduct.
Our investigation also found:
- Lawyers said they would help coach clients to make false asylum claims for Home Office interviews;
- One solicitor who invented a story for our reporter to use also branded Home Secretary Suella Braverman ‘dumb’;
- Another firm’s legal representative, who concocted a fake story for our undercover reporter, addressed the UN Human Rights Council last year and has in interviews berated the Home Office and immigration judges for not believing asylum claims.