2 August 2013
Last updated at 17:16 GMT

Immigration spot checks at railway stations across the country are to be investigated by the equality watchdog for possible unlawful discrimination.

This follows reported complaints that the checks, carried out on Thursday, targeted people based on ethnicity.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission said it would examine the powers used and their “justification”.

Immigration Minister Mark Harper denied the checks used racial profiling. He said they were based on intelligence.

A spokesman for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it would also “ask questions about the extent to which the Home Office complied with its public sector equality duty” when vans were sent around London encouraging illegal immigrants to “go home”.

As well as the spot checks at transport hubs, there were raids on workplaces on Thursday.

A Home Office spokesman said there were a total of 160 arrests, 21 of which were at stations in London.

The other 139 suspected illegal immigrants and rogue employers were arrested at locations across the country including London, Durham, Manchester, Wales and Somerset.

‘Reasonable suspicion’

The Home Office said there had been 228 immigration street operations since 2008 and there were 9,000 arrests in the past year for suspected immigration abuse.

An EHRC spokesman said it was writing to the Home Office about the checks at transport hubs.

He said the EHRC “will be examining the powers used and the justification for them, in order to assess whether unlawful discrimination took place”.

And Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence who was confirmed this week as a Labour peer, spoke out in response to claims that the checks were based on race.

“Why would you focus mainly on people of colour?” she said.

“I’m sure there’s illegal immigrants from all countries, but why would you focus that on people of colour, and I think racial profiling is coming into it.”

Mr Harper said the operations had been “based on intelligence and reasonable suspicion”.

“We don’t just stop people at random,” he said, describing the series of arrests as “lawful and proportionate”.

He later said the street operations “involved immigration officers talking to people in the local area and, where there was a reason to do so, asking questions in relation to immigration status”.

He added: “Although we do not often run these kinds of operations, it is not a new way of working. We have used these tactics effectively over many years.”

Mr Harper said he was confident immigration officers had complied with guidance, which says they must not stop people based on their race and colour but must have “reasonable suspicion” that someone has committed an immigration offence.

The guidance says street operations are designed to “target immigration offenders where intelligence has shown that they are gathered at specific locations at certain times”.

Shadow Immigration Minister Chris Bryant said he had written to the home secretary questioning the basis on which the arrests were made.

“It is in everyone’s interest to combat illegal immigration but profiling is not acceptable and should not be happening under any circumstances,” he said.

“Operations need to be intelligence-led, not based on ethnicity.”

The Unite union said earlier it was seeking legal advice about whether the “go home” vans had “incited racial hatred”.

General Secretary Len McCluskey said: “This is a vile act by a government that demeans its office by scrabbling around in the gutter with these stunts. This must not be rolled out nationwide, as some have suggested.”

The BBC revealed on Thursday how two-thirds of fines imposed on employers of illegal workers had been uncollected in the past five years, with only £25m of the £80m of fines issued collected.

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