Rishi Sunak is holding crucial last-minute talks with Conservative backbench MPs this morning in a bid to save his Rwanda bill.
The stakes are high for the PM, who has put "stopping the boats" as one of the central tenets of his premiership.
He is meeting with MPs from the New Conservatives Group this morning over breakfast.
The group has teamed up with four other rebel groups in opposition to the Government's new Rwanda legislation: the European Research Group, the Northern Research Group, the Conservative Growth Group and the Common Sense Group.
Rebels on the right of the party have said they have the numbers to defeat the Government when it votes on the legislation this evening - something that could call Sunak's leadership into question.
Yesterday, lawyers acting on behalf of the five right-wing factions published a damning verdict on Sunak's new Bill.
They warned that the Bill provides a "partial and incomplete solution to the problem of legal challenges", saying it does not "go far enough to deliver the policy as intended".
The document, which lists 13 "limitations" of the legislation, warns the Bill "contains no restrictions on the bringing of legal challenges against removal to Rwanda based on grounds other than that Rwanda is not a safe country".
It also claims there is "nothing in the Bill which would prevent the UK courts from following or being influenced by a final ruling of the Strasbourg Court on a case where the Bill does not expressly preclude them from doing so".
Sunak has been warned that, once in Rwanda, an asylum seeker "will be able to appeal any previous decisions based on new evidence".
However, the group has yet to confirm how it will advise its MPs to vote.
There is a chance it could choose to vote for the bill today, in order to make amendments at its next stage.
But it is understood that the ERG-led coalition of Tory factions wants Sunak to toughen up the Bill before it faces a vote this evening.
The group said the legislation would "require very significant amendments, some of which would potentially be outside the current title’s scope,".
They said: "In summary, the Bill overall provides a partial and incomplete solution to the problem of legal challenges in the UK courts being used as stratagems to delay or defeat the removal of illegal migrants to Rwanda.
"The Prime Minister may well be right when he claims that this is the 'toughest piece of migration legislation ever put forward by a UK Government', but we do not believe that it goes far enough to deliver the policy as intended.
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Cleverly signed a new treaty with Rwanda last week
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"Resolving, comprehensively, the issues raised by this analysis would require very significant amendments, some of which would potentially be outside the current title’s scope, and the final Bill would look very different."
But the Government's own legal advice, published just minutes later, hit back at this.
It warns that "completely blocking" legal challenges would be a "breach of international law" and "alien to UK's constitutional tradition of liberty and justice",
The guidance also notes that the UK maintained such rights "even in wartime".
