The government department, broadly responsible for policing, national security, and border control and led by Priti Patel MP as Home Secretary, said in March that it did not “want to be housing [migrants] in hotels anymore”, with the policy acting as a pull factor for illegal immigration as well as angering British taxpayers. The government vowed to send them to reception centres instead.

Nevertheless, with the Boris Johnson administration continuing to fail to prevent a crisis first declared a “major incident” back in 2018 from getting worse, never mind alleviate it, The Times now reports that it is continuing to block-book hotels to accommodate new arrivals, some indefinitely.

The newspaper focused its coverage in large part on migrant youths arriving from France on their own — so-called “unaccompanied minors” — although Home Office sources told them that these were only around 120 of the over 3,000 boat migrants who have landed in England in July so far.

56 migrant youths have reportedly been placed in Langfords Hotel in Hove, East Sussex, with the government having booked up the entire establishment for an indefinite period of time.

The “children” at Langfords are said to be aged 16 to 17 but at least some are “age disputed” — that is to say, believed to possibly be claiming to be underage teens when they are really adults.

This is a tactic which is not uncommon for people arriving in Britain illegally, although the British government is extremely lax about performing age checks compared even to the likes of Sweden.

Migrants housed in hotels with free hot meals, Internet access, and other amenities provided on the taxpayers’ dime have not always proved especially grateful, however, despite what the mainstream media has often described as their “desperate” plight prior to “fleeing” to Britain — usually from first-world France.

Earlier this year, one group of asylum seekers housed at a hotel in Reading staged a hunger strike because they were unsatisfied with the quality of the free food provided — with one alleging they received “no vegetables, no fresh milk, no cheese, no egg, no fish.”

“Imagine a kid who is growing and needs all this protein and calcium — she doesn’t get any of this,” they added — although the vast majority of boat migrants are adult males, not female children.

A “very hungry” Sudanese migrant hosted at a hotel in Glasgow took his personal protest much further in 2020, stabbing six people including a police officer, two hotel employees, and three fellow migrants before being shot dead by armed response officers.

Local activists said following the stabbing that “people were complaining at getting the same spaghetti and macaroni cheese all the time. It wasn’t culturally appropriate for them.”

Britons support a blanket ban on allowing migrants who have passed through safe countries like France to claim asylum by a margin of almost three-to-one, according to recent polling.