Inside the depraved world of Britain's migrant hunters

Far-right activists are livestreaming abuse and sharing maps in a growing campaign of harassment, Holly Evans reports

- Holly Evans

“You're a traitor. ” Those were the words heckled last week to a driver pulling into RAF Wethersfield, a former Ministry of Defence airbase in Essex currently being used to house asylum seekers.

Livestreamed from an iPhone to tens of thousands of people online, the clip shows a group of so-called migrant hunters hurling abuse at the driver, presumed to be a worker at the airbase, and threatening to publish his car's number plate.

This - verbally abusing staff and police officers on camera, before sharing the incident with fellow “patriots” - appears to be the modus operandi of the self-proclaimed migrant hunters, who are on the rise amid growing unrest over the government’s handling of the migration crisis.

Often posing as journalists, these far-right activists will turn up at accommodation centres and hotels with the intention of harassing those who work and live there. They then post the footage online with the aim - according to experts - of laying the groundwork for anti-migrant protests, which often descend into violence.

They also use Facebook and X to spread information about the locations of hotels that have been earmarked by the government to house asylum seekers. A post shared time after time in that corner of the internet is an interactive map, purporting to show the location of more than 200 hotels across the UK where migrants live.

Their methods for identifying accommodation for asylum seekers appear to be a myriad of tip-offs from disgruntled employees at the hotels in question, information from locals, as well as meticulous monitoring of Booking.com to check which three-star hotels have been blocked out for mass bookings.