Teen migrant refused help by Home Office after officials claimed he was an adult shares fears over AI age checks for asylum seekers
J.Ean was just 16 when he was left alone, scared and without any documents to prove who he was, outside the front door of the UK visas and immigration center in Croydon, London. He had reached Britain only a few hours earlier; It was his first trip outside his home country in Central Africa, and even his first time traveling outside his home country.
The past few days have been a nightmare in which he witnessed a horrific attack on his family. He had been tortured himself and had no one else to turn to, so he managed to find help from a trusted family friend.
He had flown her to England and Jean thought she might be safe with him until he was taken to Croydon’s Moon House and told she was now on her own.
“He said, ‘I can’t support you anymore,'” said Jean, a pseudonym used for security reasons. “All I remember is him saying ‘get into the building and tell them who you are’. It was a bit of a fight to let him go. I was scared, I didn’t want to go into that building. But he convinced me to go in. I later found out it was an immigration centre.” Independent.
“I felt confusion and fear. The weather, the language… everything was new to me. I was just lost. At first I was afraid to see people in uniform because it brought me back to what I had witnessed at home. I was traumatized by what I had experienced.”
Thousands of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children seek help from UK authorities every year, the majority of whom are 16 or 17 years old. In the year ending March 2025, there were 3,707 asylum requests from children alone.
Social services must provide people aged 17 and under with a safe place to live, as well as clothing, food, education, and assistance with applying for asylum.
But hundreds of children are mistakenly treated as adults by Home Office officials, meaning they do not receive the help they are entitled to and are often exposed to dangerous situations.
Data obtained by the Helen Bamber Foundation has revealed that at least 678 children will be incorrectly classified as adults in 2024 after a “visual assessment” by people at the border.
David Bolt, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, found factors such as “lack of an eye contract” were used in the decision-making and said children were “pressured” to declare they were over 18. In a sample of 55 cases in which the Home Office said the asylum seeker was “significantly over 18 years of age”, 76 per cent of the cases examined by the inspector were actually found to be children.
Ministers now plan to replace human judgment with AI facial recognition technology, in a move that charities and human rights groups say amounts to an “experiment with immigrants” that will lead to “serious, life-changing consequences”.
The Home Office is seeking “an algorithm that can accurately estimate a person’s age.” A government tender notice seen by Independent, He says the technology “will have multiple use cases for the Home Office, one example being that it could help determine the age of people encountered without verifiable identification documents.”
The three-year contract, which starts in February next year, is worth £1.3 million. Announcing the plans in July, then Home Secretary Dame Angela Eagle said artificial intelligence facial age estimation technology would be the “most cost-effective option”.
He said the aim is for centenary age estimation to be “fully integrated into the existing age assessment system by 2026”.
It is not yet clear at what stage of the asylum process the artificial intelligence age estimation technology will be used; Whether it will apply to children arriving in the UK on small boats or whether it will be used to inform final asylum claim decisions. The Home Office said the technology would be used to assist authorities and that no final decision had been made on which stage of the process it would be integrated into.
If used on arrival, the algorithm will need to take into account the aging effect of traumatic journeys and past torture and abuse – experiences that often make young asylum seekers appear older.
When Jean arrived in the UK in 2012, she initially received help from social services and was kept in care with other children. However, Home Office officials later determined that he was not a child and his support was taken away.
The decision was devastating. “I was called for an interview at 4pm. They gave me a time when the offices were about to close, that is my current understanding, but I did not disclose it at the time,” he said.
“I had to wait for them to pick me up at 5pm. They said, ‘You’re not a child, you’re a liar.’ I said, ‘I’m not a liar, I know who I am, I know my age.’ When someone comes to the table and asks your age, you feel like you’re invisible. You have to fight for your identity, it’s not easy to fight for your identity.”
“You feel like you have to isolate yourself to cope with what you’re going through, you’re constantly questioning: Why, why, why? It feels like you want to end it all because they don’t believe you, and I’m sure many young people are in the same situation.”
He said immigration officials told him he had to go to the offices of a charity called the Refugee Council and find his own way there: “They gave me a map and it was a long journey to get there, especially because I had difficulty with the language. I managed to get there but it was about to close and I was sent to a hostel to sleep.”
A boy, now 17 years old and speaking very little English, was staying in a hostel with adult refugees. She felt incredibly insecure and felt like leaving would be a good decision; he later viewed this as a mistake.
“I was traumatized, anxious, and just wanted to be by myself. That was the idea,” she explained. This then led to nearly four years of barely sleeping in London – until a stranger who saw him begging for money at a train station directed him to the Notre Dame charity in Leicester Square.
Jean received a referral to the immigration charity Freedom from Torture, which could support her in making a new asylum claim. A judge’s decision to grant him asylum in 2018 and the recognition that he should have been helped as a child refugee years ago meant Jean now had a roof over his head in council-provided accommodation.
On the day of our interview, he heard that he was now a British citizen. But he fears for others like him, who came to the UK as children but were told they were liars.
Speaking of the government’s plans to use AI to aid decision-making, he said: “This is a way of not treating people like humans. They’re treating us like a tool to train their AI.”
“They’re testing something and it’s like, we’re not humans, they’re like, ‘Okay, let’s use it.’
“We all know that making computer-based decisions isn’t always right. They need to understand that many young people are traumatized and may look different when they really need help.”
Kamena Dorling, policy director at the Helen Bamber Foundation, said the government’s plans were “worrying unless significant action is taken”.
He added: “Current evidence has found that AI may be less accurate and more biased than human decision-making when assessing a person’s age, with similar error patterns.
“It is crucial that AI cannot account for factors that can significantly alter the outlook of a young person fleeing conflict and persecution and making dangerous journeys, such as trauma, malnutrition and exhaustion.”
Anna Bacciarelli, senior AI researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: “The UK government’s plans to use centennial age estimation are misguided at best and should be scrapped immediately.
“In addition to subjecting vulnerable children and young people to an inhumane process that could undermine their privacy, non-discrimination and other human rights, we don’t really know if the technology works. There are no standardized industry benchmarks and no ethical way to train and supervise this technology on similar populations.”
“So far in the UK it has been used in shops and pubs, not in refugee processing centres.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “Robust age assessments are a vital tool in maintaining border security.
“We will begin streamlining this process in the coming months through testing of fast and effective AI age estimation technology. We then plan to integrate facial age estimation into the existing system, based on testing and assurance results.”
