A tiny village is taking a stand against its own government as it faces the threat of being overrun by migrants.

The couple hundred residents of Piddington, Oxfordshire, in the United Kingdom, voted July 4 for independence against the United Kingdom in a bid against authorities who are seeking to flood the area with illegal male migrants. The vote to separate passed in an overwhelming 96 percent majority.

At the heart of the problem for Piddington is the Home Office’s (the UK equivalent of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) June 26 decision to relocate almost 4,000 migrants to three rural former military bases. One of those bases — the Ministry of Defense Bicester — sits directly next to Piddington and has a fence that runs alongside many locals’ homes, one resident told GB News. The site also borders a playground for children and families created by the parish council.

An estimated 1,250 single adult male asylum seekers aged 18 to 65 are expected to be relocated to the Bicester base next to Piddington. This is over four times the population of the entire village.

The relocation of migrants is part of the British Labour Party’s efforts to end the temporary housing of illegals in hotels as they await case processing. The hotel system has sparked huge controversy and has cost British taxpayers billions of pounds, while contributing to housing shortages.

The Home Office plans to use the Bicester camp for a minimum of 10 years, according to a government fact sheet. The government says it will appoint a “specialist provider of asylum accommodation” to manage the camp and will provide 24/7 on-site security through “a provider of security services” and “CCTV monitoring and recording.”

Locals have expressed fear, however, that the sudden and overwhelming flood of single male migrants into the area will make the village unsafe for women and children.

Piddington resident Tim McNally, who chairs the village’s Parish Council, said his neighbors are distraught.

“[The camp] will just turn the village into a ghost town. It’ll just destroy the spirit of the village, and that’s how people feel absolutely trapped, stressed, concerned,” McNally told the Daily Caller.

“I’ve had men — grown men — crying to me because they’ve got young daughters of an age that for the next 10 years they’ll be young ladies,” McNally added. “One guy who’s got an 18-year-old said, ‘I will not let her go out. I will not let her leave the house alone.’”

Piddington — a village of just 150 homes — has no police force of its own. “We have no crime in this area,” McNally said. “There’s no police. There’s no need. The community is very tight. It’s very well connected.”

“There’s a lot of young people coming into the village, young families evolving, growing here now,” McNally added. “And they are absolutely beside themselves to determine what on earth to do.”

“We don’t have anything to defend ourselves with,” McNally said, “It’s against the law for us to carry a knife or have a gun.”

The government information page on the project reports that asylum seekers will undergo “mandatory security checks” before they reach the camp by “linking their biometric data to immigration, security, and criminality databases.”

But, as McNally observed, foreign criminal databases are not readily accessible, much less after Britain’s exit from the European Union in 2020. “They don’t have access to anything.”

“Only 10 days or 15 days before [the announcement],” McNally added, “I was listening in to BBC Radio Four. And they were interviewing […] the Home Office — these are the people who basically are responsible for managing these asylum seekers — and they were asking, how do they age-verify the people coming in? And [the Home Office] admitted they have no means to verify the age of any of these people.”

“They have no documentation,” McNally told the Caller. “There’s no database they can utilize. There is nothing they can do to verify who these people are by age.”

“If you can’t verify by age, what database can you review to link anyone together anyway? You can’t,” McNally said. “[The Home Office is] using the words to try and make [the camp] sound less risky than it is.”

But the migrant camp poses more threats to Piddington than just safety. McNally —who lives just a 10-minute walk from the base’s front gate — told the Caller it will take a serious toll on the financial stability of his neighbors.

“The values of their houses are virtually just dumped,” McNally said. “Even if they wanted to leave, some of them would have to pay money back to the bank to get out of the village, because no one is going to want to own their property in this village with 1,250 men having the freedom to run around as they wish.”

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Lucy Spence, The Daily Caller