Thousands of foreign prisoners due for deportation have been released into the community without being tagged, Theresa May has admitted, leaving the door wide open for their abscondment. In a letter sent while she was Home Secretary, Mrs May admitted that fewer than one in ten were being monitored. The letter, sent last month to Keith Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee while Mrs May was still Home Secretary, revealed that all of the offenders were “subject to ongoing deportation action.” Mrs May added: “We do not give up trying to deport these individuals.” However, she confirmed that just 493 out of 5,789 “foreign national offenders” released from prisons into the community had been issued with “radio-frequency tags” to enable police to monitor them, the Telegraph has reported. In 2007 the government was forced to hand out compensation to foreign prisoners who were held beyond the end of their sentence while deportation orders were considered. Consequently the authorities now release the prisoners back into the community to await deportation proceeds. But the pace of deportations is currently laboriously slow, with as few as 102 foreign nationals being deported over the 16 months between February 2015 and June 2016, down from