Asylum seekers ‘SEVEN times more likely to be arrested on railways’

Asylum seekers are up to seven times more likely to be arrested than the rest of the population, official figures suggest.

For every 10,000 asylum seekers, 7.88 arrests were made on Britain’s railways last year.

In comparison, the equivalent rate was 1.07 for everyone else.

Ministers today were urged to ‘abolish the entire asylum system’ on the back of the British Transport Police statistics, obtained via a freedom of information request.

Ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe, founder of the Restore Britain thinktank, told the Daily Mail that the Conservatives, ‘many of whom now sit in the Reform party’ were to blame for importing so many asylum seekers into the country, a process ‘accelerated by the Labour government’.

He added: ‘Every single migrant who has entered illegally must be detained and deported.

‘Then we must abolish the entire asylum system. That is how we make our transport system safe again.’

Last month, an Iraqi asylum seeker was jailed for groping and kissing a 20-year-old on September 22 after spotting her at a train station in Crawley.

Hawre Mohamed, 27, barged through the ticket barriers and boarded the same Thameslink train as the student – who was travelling home from college – telling her ‘I want to have sex with you’.

In shocking CCTV footage, he can be seen smirking at the young woman and giving her the thumbs up before the attack.

In court, it was heard that he had spent the day attempting to approach random women. 

Another shocking case involved a Sudanese migrant who attacked two train guards, threatening he would ‘teach them a lesson’ after jumping a station barrier.

Karam Abdulkarim-Mohamed, 30, called the guards ‘motherf******’ after they stopped him at Reading railway station in January. He punched one man twice in the head and spat at the other. 

The BTP police Britain’s railways, which includes the London Underground, Docklands Light Railway, the Midland Metro tram system, Croydon Tramlink, Tyne and Wear Metro, and the IFS cloud cable car.

Its data showed that 81 asylum seekers had been arrested by officers in England and Wales in the calendar year up to November 2025.

The Home Office told the Daily Mail it does not publicly publish the total number of asylum seekers, but its data shows there are 103,000 asylum seekers currently being supported to live in England and Wales. 

Using that population figure allowed us to calculate the arrest rate. 

The rate might be lower if there were a significant number of asylum seekers not being supported by the Home Office, however this data is not publicly available.

For the rest of the population, there were 6,619 arrests.

The rate was calculated using the official Office for National Statistics (ONS) population estimates for England and Wales for mid-2024, which gave a figure of 61.7million.

But the section recording nationality was incomplete in around 95 per cent of arrests made by the BTP in 2025, meaning the rates could in reality be far different. However, this is the best data publicly available on the topic.

There have been calls for Labour to publish more data to when it comes to migrant crime, but so far it has failed to do so – despite promising to last April.

Some have called for Britain to increase transparency on migrant crime by officially publishing league tables shaming nationalities guilty of the highest rates, as Denmark and some US states already do.

Academics at the Oxford Migration Observatory, the UK’s most-respected organisation studying the topic, have said in the past that ‘it’s likely that asylum seekers are more likely to commit crimes’.

This, they argue, is partly down to the fact that asylum seekers are more likely to be young men, and young men are more likely to commit a crime. 

Other factors include the trauma of the journey to Britain, poor mental health more broadly, and socioeconomic status. However, the data we have available can’t account for all of these competing factors. 

The Home Office has been contacted for comment.

A BTP spokesperson said: ‘As a police force we are required to uphold the law and every crime report we receive is treated objectively. 

‘Officers will continue to make arrests where necessary when someone is suspected of committing a criminal offence, in order to protect the travelling public and keep the railway safe.’

The BPT also said it was nearly impossible to draw conclusions from its own data because the nationality field was blank 95 per cent of the time in 2025.

It also pointed out that not all suspects arrested are guilty of an offence, as some will only have reasonable grounds for suspicion.

And not all suspects are processed via arrest, for example, someone suspected of an offence may be invited for a voluntary interview.

The data does not break down the asylum seekers’ nationality, but in the year to September 2025, the most common for people claiming asylum were Pakistani (11 per cent), Eritrean (8 per cent), Iranian (7 per cent), Afghan (7 per cent), and Bangladeshi (6 per cent).

The Home Office’s data shows 95 per cent of small boat arrivals apply for asylum.