How a Mail on Sunday Story About a Non-Existent ‘Migrant Crime Wave’ Led to an Anti-Migrant Protest

Earlier this month, the Mail on Sunday claimed to reveal “the shocking scale of serious crime committed by migrants living in hotels in communities across Britain”.

The newspaper’s investigation claimed that the scale of a “migrant crime wave” had “until now been unknown”. It showed that at least 312 asylum seekers have been charged with an “astonishing” 708 alleged criminal offences in just three years.

The investigation was endorsed by shadow home secretary Chris Philp. Scratch its surface and all it reveals is the prejudice of the Mail, campaigners say.

They point out that the Mail’s figures include innocent people who’ve been acquitted, as well as those yet to be found guilty of any crime. They add that the 312 who’ve been charged represent a fraction of the tens of thousands of people who have passed through asylum accommodation in the three years reported on by the Mail.

“Describing this as a ‘migrant crime wave’ is not only completely dishonest but incredibly dangerous, at a time when families forced to live in asylum hotels are being threatened on their doorstep by violent crowds,” Nathan Phillips, head of campaigns at migrant charity Asylum Matters, told Novara Media.

By this point, it was too late. The Mail’s scaremongering appears to have had a direct role in sparking at least one anti-migrant protest, due to take place on Saturday. The protest has been endorsed by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon AKA Tommy Robinson, currently in Tenerife while police investigate his alleged assault of a man at St Pancras station.

Alongside its piece on the migrant “crime wave”, the Mail published an accompanying report focusing on the number of crimes linked to one hotel that also houses asylum seekers: the Barbican Thistle in Islington, north London. The day after the article was published, a Facebook group sprang up organising a protest at the accommodation, carrying the Mail’s headline as its header image.

The Mail’s report on the Barbican Thistle said that 41 residents of the hotel had been charged with 90 crimes over the past three years. Once again, the sensationalist framing only told part of the story. A coalition of local residents, community groups and anti-racist campaigners who are opposing Saturday’s demonstration called the Mail’s claims “inflammatory, misleading, and politically motivated.”

A Met police briefing from July 2025 seen by Novara Media shows a 5% reduction in crime in the ward where the accommodation is situated over the last 12 months. Sexual and violent offences were down by around 5%, knife crime by a quarter. As you would expect from an inner-London ward, crime does happen. Bucking the positive trend, drug offences were up by a quarter, public order offences by nearly half. Hate crimes, meanwhile, rose by 37.2%.

Leah Borromeo, a journalist and filmmaker who lives near the Barbican Thistle, told Novara Media she didn’t recognise the dire picture painted by the Mail’s reporting. “I cannot speak for everybody within the neighbourhood, but my personal experience as a mixed-race female-presenting parent with a small child, I have not had any issue at all [with people in the hotel].”

“We’ve encountered quite a lot of the folks who live there throughout our daily lives. They go to the local supermarket. They go to the same parks.”

The anti-migrant demonstration will be opposed by anti-racists organised by Islington Community Independents and Stand Up to Racism gathering outside the hotel at 12.30.

Anti-fascist research group Red Flare has been monitoring the Facebook group for Saturday’s protest. Speaking to Novara Media, its spokesperson Alan Jones said that the group provides a snapshot of how racist sentiment has been normalised by the media and politicians, meaning protests are organised not only by hardened far-right activists but also people who do not typically engage with politics.

“There are some known [far-right] names in the group, but there are also locals who wouldn’t recognise the label ‘far-right’. This has been stoked by big newspapers and politicians from Reform UK, the Conservatives and even Labour.”

“These protests are stemming from racist concerns about the hotel, which are probably more commonly-held than people would like to think.”

This requires a shift from the anti-fascist organising of the 2010s, when the EDL would regularly hold drunken, disorderly marches through towns and then go home, having created no links with communities.

“Antifascists need to understand that it’s a different kind of organising that we’re opposing,” Jones said. He pointed to tenants unions as organisations which can address material issues which can otherwise be seized upon by the far-right.

While far-right provocateurs are now taking an interest in the Barbican Thistle, the frenzy of interest in the hotel was started by Philp.

In June, the shadow home secretary posted a social media video of himself visiting the hotel, in which he points at Uber Eats and Deliveroo bikes as evidence of illegal work being done by residents of the hotel.

Ily, an asylum seeker who fled the Taliban because he was teaching IT to girls, told local newspaper the Islington Tribune of his distress at seeing dehumanising online comments caused by the video. Philp was criticised by Praxis, a charity which provides legal advice to some of those staying in the hotel, which said that the reporting was false and could lead to violence – an allegation which he angrily rejected.

Borromeo, who grew up as a refugee in the United States, found the way the residents of the hotel were used for a stunt was offensive. She said: “The one thing that tends to escape them is the fact that there are real lives behind the PR that they’re trying to build.”

Philips said: “To suggest that every person seeking sanctuary is responsible for crimes committed by a tiny minority is nothing other than blatant, shameless racism.”

Philp told Novara Media: “Nothing in my video identified the hotel nor did I mention the hotel by name. At no point did I say every migrant was responsible for the crimes of those committing offences, although all crossing the Channel have done so illegally.”

For Borromeo, the threat comes not from the residents of the Barbican Thistle, but from those who are using them to sew division. “As a parent, my concern is the overall safety of bringing fascism to my neighborhood,” she said. “Children and other folks are going to be dragged out on the streets and tokenised to push a hateful agenda. That is something that is of a greater concern to me than having a few hundred brown people living in a building.”

The Mail on Sunday has been approached for comment.