British Home Secretary Sajid Javid has confirmed that more than half of the deported Windrush migrants are convicted criminals and that he will not be seeking to bring them back.

Speaking to BBC anchor Andrew Marr on his Sunday morning show, the newly-minted Home Secretary admitted that of 62 deported migrants from the so-called Windrush generation — who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1971, when they had the legal right to do so — 32 were convicted criminals.

Javid told Marr that his department was doing everything it could to track down the other 31 migrants and compensate them, but said he had no interest in bringing back the ex-cons.

“Of the offenders, of the serious offenders, I’m not in touch with any of them, and I’m not going to get in touch with any of them, because I don’t want them back in our country. They can stay where they are,” he said.

Home Secretary @sajidjavid speaks on how he is handling the Windrush scandal. #marr pic.twitter.com/3bwOCeH8bq — The Andrew Marr Show (@MarrShow) June 3, 2018

Predictably, Javid’s refusal to bring convicted criminals back to Britain drew the ire of Labour’s David Lammy MP, the former Minister of State for Culture who now serves as Parliament’s leading proponent of race-based identity politics.

“All Windrush citizens who have been deported are British citizens,” he insisted.

“We do not deport British citizens — if they have committed a crime they serve their time… They are citizens first and foremost, everything else is secondary.”

The former barrister appears to be completely wrong, however. Citizens who came to Britain from overseas and possess dual nationality can, in fact, be deprived of their British citizenship by the Home Secretary, provided their presence is deemed not conducive to the public good.

This power is exercised surprisingly sparingly but has been used against some convicted terrorists and child grooming gang members.

More recently, there have been calls for these powers to be used against thousands of foreign-born gangsters, human traffickers, and drug dealers identified as having links to organised crime by the National Crime Agency — but the Home Office has ignored several requests for information about whether it intends to act.

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery