On Friday morning last week, a tired-looking Albanian woman and her young daughter disembarked a flight from Barcelona and walked up to passport control at Dublin Airport.
They were in Ireland for a holiday, she told the Border Management Unit (BMU) officer in the booth. Her aunt had booked the trip for them two days previously.
The officer became increasingly suspicious when the woman was unable to answer simple questions about where she was staying or what sights she planned to see.
When the officer put it to her that he did not believe she was here on holiday, she admitted her story was a fabrication. She said she wanted to claim asylum in Ireland.
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After more questioning, the officer established she had flown from Athens to Barcelona and then on to Ireland. Somehow, she had managed to board the flight to Dublin without a valid visa. Irish officials would raise that with the airline later and likely issue a fine to the carrier.
The woman is one of thousands of people who have attempted to enter Ireland in recent years without valid travel documents. In the vast majority of cases, these travellers then make a claim for asylum, meaning they are admitted to the country while their claim is assessed.
The number of asylum seekers arriving without valid papers has been a source of some embarrassment to the Government. It has prompted Minister of Justice Helen McEntee to introduce a range of enforcement measures, including increasing fines for airlines for allowing a passenger board without a passport and arresting people who destroy their passport during their journey.
So far this year, 220 people have been charged with failing to produce a passport and 80 have been jailed. This compares with just one prosecution between 2019 and 2022.
One of the biggest changes has been granting more powers and resources to the BMU to combat irregular immigration and people smuggling through Dublin Airport where the vast majority of visitors to Ireland arrive. Almost 180 people now work for the BMU, which is part of the Department of Justice. It now conducts all immigration control at the airport, freeing up about 100 gardaí for other immigration enforcement work.
At passport control, the woman is told to wait on a bench while her case is examined.
Meanwhile, BMU officers process a flight of Americans, most of them tourists. They are asked a few questions about where they are staying and what part of the country they are visiting before the officers wish them a pleasant day and wave them on.
“Everyone gets the same treatment,” says Eileen Leahy, the head of the BMU.
Her officers take pride in their courtesy, she says, whether they’re dealing with a tourist or asylum seeker. Sometimes they will wish a traveller a happy birthday if they notice it on their passport, she says.
The BMU has faced a series of unprecedented challenges. During the Covid-19 pandemic, immigration officers found themselves enforcing public-health regulations and had to quickly learn how to spot fake vaccination and PCR tests certificates.
That was followed almost immediately by the refugee crisis caused by the war in Ukraine which saw BMU officers processing tens of thousands of traumatised arrivals, many of whom had to leave without belongings or travel documents.
Then came the sharp rise in asylum seekers from other countries, including many who arrived having disposed of their passports. In the first half of 2022, just under 3,000 people arrived at the airport without valid travel documents. Of these, 77 per cent claimed asylum.
Those numbers have fallen sharply since. In the first seven months of 2024, there were 1,471 such arrivals.
One of the reasons for the decrease is the increasing deployment of so-called doorstep operations by the BMU. Instead of waiting for passengers to reach passport control to check their documents, officers will often meet them just after they disembark the aircraft.
This serves a number of purposes, says Leahy. It reduces the opportunities to dispose of passports during the long walk from the aircraft to immigration control. Airport staff often find passports stuffed in bins or left in toilets.
It also means officers can immediately tell what aircraft a person with no passport disembarked from, a process which otherwise in an airport as busy as Dublin could involve several hours of detective work.
Staff rely on intelligence from national and international agencies, as well as their own experience, to identify routes used for irregular migration and to determine where they should focus doorstep operations.
Airline staff abroad will frequently flag suspicious passengers by ringing a duty phone carried by BMU staff. The phone goes off every few minutes during our visit.
Flights arriving from Frankfurt are currently considered high risk for undocumented migration and people smuggling. That morning, the BMU officers mounted a doorstep operation for an aircraft arriving from the German city.
Officers set up near the aircraft’s exit and quickly checked passports as passengers filed past.
“Jesus Christ,” replied one man after being told that, yes, he would have to present his passport again at immigration control. However, most had no complaints.
“Most people seem to understand what we’re trying to do here,” says O’Donohoe, the BMU’s head of operations.
On this flight, everyone seemed to have a valid passport.
O’Donohoe explained that asylum seekers are entitled to apply for refugee status, whether they have a passport or not. But if that is the case, why do so many people destroy or dump them?
“They’re essentially being advised to do that by the people who are facilitating the travel on the other side. These are criminal gangs that are operating the distribution of false documents,” he says.
“They are telling people when you travel to Ireland that if you destroy your document on board the aircraft, you are more likely to be able to stay in that country and proceed with your asylum application.”
It is in the interests of these gangs that immigration officers do not see the forged passports from which they could glean vital intelligence.
In other cases, criminals will provide passports to customers to allow them to embark the aircraft. They will then take these passports back before take-off or before immigration control on the other side so they can be reused.
Detecting this method of people smuggling is becoming more frequent because of the increased doorstep operations, O’Donohoe says.
So far this year, the BMU has referred 40 suspected smuggling cases to gardaí, leading to charges being brought against 17 suspects.
In one recent case, a BMU officer was returning from holidays in Spain when he noticed a man taking passports from seven passengers on his flight just before the aircraft took off. The man then claimed to be ill and disembarked the aircraft. It was a clear case of people smuggling and he alerted his colleagues back in Dublin who were waiting at the door of the aircraft when it landed.
In other cases, people fleeing war zones or emergencies are simply unable to obtain get their passports before travelling to Ireland. This was a frequent occurrence during the initial influx of refugees from Ukraine, Leahy said.
While hundreds of people are continuing to enter the country without passports, O’Donohoe pushes back on the idea that this means officials do not know the identities of those arriving.
Asylum seekers are typically happy to present other forms of ID to confirm their identity, which is then cross-referenced against European Union police databases. Their fingerprints are also taken and inputted into a variety of international databases.
“A lot of the time, people will also volunteer their phone, which will have photographs of their passports on it,” he says. “In the vast, vast majority of cases we are absolutely able to identify the person.”
Back at immigration control, the staff are preparing to conduct a preliminary asylum interview with the Albanian woman. Her daughter, who can’t be more than five years old, plays with one of the crowd-control barriers as the BMU officers speaks to the woman through an interpreter.
The woman is then fingerprinted, a process which takes slightly longer than usual as the child insists on holding her mother’s free hand throughout.
With this completed, the staff arrange for ham and cheese sandwiches for the pair and tell the woman to appear at the International Protection Office on Mount Street in Dublin city centre on Monday. The final step is calling the International Protection Accommodation Service to see if there are any beds for them for the weekend.
“It can be a very tough job. You do see people arriving in difficult circumstances. They’re not just numbers to us,” says O’Donohoe.
“We’re also aware of the outside pressures and the climate we’re in. The staff aren’t immune to that. They see social media.”
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