Nearly all women who try to reach the UK in small boats from northern France have been raped on their journey, Shabana Mahmood has claimed.

In an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast, the home secretary said far-right, balaclava-wearing activists would “kill” or “kick me out of my own country” if they took power.

Speaking to the former Tory minister Rory Stewart and Tony Blair’s former close adviser Alastair Campbell, she said sexual abusers would exploit most asylum seekers as long as traffickers continued to decide who came to the UK.

She said: “We’re not in control of this border. The sifting of the people that end up in the north of France and are about to get on a dinghy is done by criminal gangs who are also, by the way, people traffickers.

“You can almost guarantee that every woman that’s in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey. Some of the men too, they’ve certainly been abused and threatened. That is not the model that should decide whether somebody gets to come to the UK, make this their place of sanctuary and ultimately become one of us.”

Asked by Campbell about balaclava-wearing protesters shutting down ports and praising her policies, she said they should “sod off”.

She added: “They’re just troublemakers. You know, they’d kill me in a minute if they could, and they’d definitely kick me out of my own country. So let’s just be really clear about who and what they are. They don’t think I’m a true Brit and they hate the fact that I’m a Muslim.”

Mahmood also said she considered herself “part of the pro-Palestinian cause” and felt “very uncomfortable” over the arrests of activists opposing the ban imposed on Palestine Action.

Merseyside police arrested 82 people on Monday at the Labour party conference on suspicion of wearing or carrying articles supporting a proscribed organisation.

In a protest organised by Defend Our Juries, scores of people sat outside the conference centre in Liverpool, many holding handmade banners saying they supported Palestine Action.

Read More: Nearly all women arriving on small boats have been raped, says Shabana Mahmood