The one in, one out deal treats desperate refugees as bargaining chips, shipping traumatized people back into the hands of the smugglers who brutalized them. Forcing torture survivors into freezing camps with no shelter, no health care and no safety is cruelty masquerading as policy. Crossings fell because of weather and wider European trends, not because inflicting misery on a few hundred people works.
A deal that returned barely a few hundred people while tens of thousands kept landing was always a gimmick, and at roughly 56,000 pounds a head the taxpayer got fleeced for nothing. Handing control of the border to Paris and to sympathetic courtrooms guaranteed collapse the moment lawyers found a loophole. Real control means detaining and deporting anyone who arrives illegally, with no endless appeals.
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