AMBER Rudd is facing accusations she misled Parliament, after she was forced to deny seeing a memo copied to her office showing that the Home Office had set targets for immigration removals.

The leak of the memo comes just a day after the Home Secretary told MPs she had never agreed to specific targets. Labour and the SNP said her position had become “untenable” and called on her to resign.

According to The Guardian, the secret internal Home Office document referred to the department setting “a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18” adding “we have exceeded our target of assisted returns”.

The six-page memo, prepared by Hugh Ind, the director general of the Immigration Enforcement (IE) agency, last June, was copied to Rudd’s office, but she claims not to have seen the leaked document.

The memo was said to have gone on to refer to the progress that had been made towards achieving a 10 per cent increase in performance on enforced returns “which we promised the Home Secretary earlier this year”.

Rudd responded through a statement on social media last night.

She tweeted: “I will be making a statement in the House of Commons on Monday in response to legitimate questions that have arisen on targets and illegal migration. I wasn’t aware of specific removal targets. I accept I should have been and I’m sorry that I wasn’t.

“I didn’t see the leaked document, although it was copied to my office as many documents are. As Home Secretary I will work to ensure that our immigration policy is fair and humane.”

Prior to that statement, shadow home secretary Diane Abbott had said: “Amber Rudd either failed to read this memo, and has no clear understanding of the policies in her own department, or she has misled Parliament and the British people.

“Either way, she needs to accept responsibility and resign immediately.”

SNP home affairs spokeswoman Joanna Cherry said Rudd’s position had become “untenable”.

“If this secret memo is accurate then it suggests the Home Secretary is either utterly incompetent, or she knowingly lied to Parliament – either way Amber Rudd must go,” she said.

It comes amid accusations that the targets contributed to the “hostile environment” which led to members of the Windrush generation being wrongly threatened with deportation.

Rudd had initially denied the Home Office had targets for removals when she was questioned on Wednesday by a Commons committee investigating the Windrush scandal.

However, after it emerged a 2015 inspection report made clear the practice did exist, she told MPs on Thursday that while the immigration arm of the Home Office had used “local targets” they were “not published targets against which performance was assessed”.

According to the document, dated June 21 2017, the IE agency made 12,503 enforced returns in 2016-17, which was considered a “success”.

The memo states: “IE has set a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18, aided by the redistribution of resources towards this area. This will move us along the path towards the 10 per cent increased performance on enforced returns, which we promised the Home Secretary earlier this year.”

The memo then turns to “assisted returns” – which covers cases such as those where an individual has left the country voluntarily on a flight paid for by the British Government.

“Typically these will be our most vulnerable returnees. We have exceeded our target of assisted returns. We set an internal target of 1250 of these returns for 2016-17 ... we delivered 1581.”