Report Claims AI Has Been Quietly Built Into Home Office Immigration Work

Artificial intelligence has been embedded across the Home Office with almost no public scrutiny, strengthening the so-called hostile environment for immigration, according to new research from Open Rights Group (ORG).

The report says the technology is now involved in tasks including the detection of potential sham marriages, the assessment of asylum seekers' ages and the checking of the contents of phones belonging to new arrivals. It is also used in border surveillance through live facial recognition and AI-powered drones and satellites.

Other uses cited include summarising asylum interviews and the country policy information that serves as evidence in those interviews. The Identify and Prioritise Immigration Cases tool, known as Ipic, is described as an opaque system that helps prioritise and assess cases.

The findings draw on a mix of limited material published by the Home Office, freedom of information requests and questions put by MPs. The report, titled Automated Discrimination: Unpacking the Digital Hostile Environment, has cross-party backing from Labour's Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Scottish National party's Pete Wishart and the Green party's Siân Berry.

Its authors argue that AI is neither neutral nor accurate and can reproduce bias and discrimination already present in society, especially when anti-immigration policies and rhetoric are a main reason for adopting it. They say the tools are being trialled and tested in near-total secrecy, with officials routinely citing national security to stonewall freedom of information requests and redact disclosures.

Successive governments are criticised for promoting an ideology that treats complex human cases as a technical problem to be fixed. The report warns of "reducing people to data points" and of repeating the hostile environment first envisaged by Theresa May as home secretary in 2012. "Relying on AI to decide who gets to stay here and who gets thrown back into danger is a deeply alarming move," it states.

ORG wants the government to regulate AI and ban uses it considers undemocratic or likely to risk human rights violations, such as the use of ChatGPT tools in asylum applications. It also calls for more transparency, stronger freedom of information laws, a narrower definition of national security and a robust public register of government AI tools.

Ribeiro-Addy said the Home Office had been reluctant to publish documents explaining how AI is used in asylum processing, what the problems are and how they are being addressed. She said the department had not explained how it would ensure accountability when the tools fail, or justified why "some of the most vulnerable people, with the least power, should bear the greatest risks."

Sara Alsherif, a programme manager at ORG, said migration is "a human phenomenon and experience, not a technical problem that can be fixed by artificial intelligence." She called for urgent transparency, accountability and strict regulation to restrict how AI is used and to prevent its wider rollout.

A Home Office spokesperson said AI is one of several tools used to protect borders and does not replace or automate human decision-makers. Asylum decisions are made by trained caseworkers, they said, with AI used only to help navigate interview records and policy information. The spokesperson added that the tools cannot be used in isolation, are monitored alongside quality-assurance processes, and that the department has committed to publishing updated evaluations of their rollout.