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LONDON (AP) — U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak quelled a Conservative Party rebellion and got his stalled plan to send some asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda through the House of Commons on Wednesday.

Lawmakers voted 320 to 276 to back a bill intended to overcome a U.K. Supreme Court block on the Rwanda plan. But the contentious immigration policy on which Sunak has staked his authority still faces political and legal hurdles. And Sunak remains at the helm of a divided and demoralized party that is lagging in the polls.

UK PRIME MINISTER RISHI SUNAK CONTINUES TO FACE HEAT OVER CONTROVERSIAL PLAN TO SEND MIGRANTS TO RWANDA

The vote came a day after some 60 members of Sunak’s governing Conservatives rebelled in an effort to make the legislation tougher. The dissent cost Sunak two party deputy chairmen, who quit in order to vote against the government.

But when it came to a vote on the bill as a whole, the rebellion melted away, and only 11 Conservatives voted against the legislation.

A larger rebellion Wednesday would have doomed the Safety of Rwanda Bill, and imperiled Sunak’s 15-month-old government.

"It’s this bill or no bill. It’s this bill or no chance," Conservative lawmaker Bob Seely told colleagues before the vote.

The bill now goes to the unelected House of Lords, Parliament’s upper chamber, where it faces more opposition.

With polls showing the Conservatives trailing far behind the Labour opposition in opinion polls, Sunak has made the controversial — and expensive — immigration policy central to his attempt to win an election this year.

He argues that deporting unauthorized asylum-seekers will deter people from making risky journeys across the English Channel and break the business model of people-smuggling gangs.

"We have a plan. It’s working," Sunak said Wednesday in the House of Commons.

He needs to convince fellow Conservatives, as well as voters, that it’s true. But the liberal and law-and-order wings of the Conservatives — always uneasy allies — are at loggerheads over the Rwanda plan.

Moderates worry the policy is too extreme, concerns underscored when the United Nations’ refugee agency said this week the Rwanda plan "is not compatible with international refugee law."

However, many on the party’s powerful right wing think the bill doesn’t go far enough in deterring migration to the U.K. Hard-liners’ attempts to toughen the bill on Wednesday failed as lawmakers rejected several amendments, including one that would have let British authorities routinely ignore emergency injunctions from the European Court of Human Rights.

Critics say that would breach international law, but Suella Braverman, a former interior minister and leading hard-liner, said the "foreign" European court was "currently controlling this country’s ability to stop the boats."

Many rebels grudgingly voted for the bill rather than risk sinking the whole policy, but they remain unhappy.

Sunak insists the bill goes as far as the government can because Rwanda will pull out of its agreement to rehouse asylum-seekers if the U.K. breaks international law.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said the Conservatives are tearing themselves apart over the plan, like "hundreds of bald men scrapping over a single broken comb."

The Rwanda policy is key to Sunak’s pledge to "stop the boats "bringing unauthorized migrants to the U.K. across the English Channel from France. More than 29,000 people made the perilous journey in 2023, down from 42,000 the year before. Five people died last week while trying to launch a boat from northern France in the dark and winter cold.

London and Kigali made a deal almost two years ago under which migrants who reach Britain across the Channel would be sent to Rwanda, where they would stay permanently. Britain has paid Rwanda at least 240 million pounds ($305 million) under the agreement, but no one has yet been sent to the East African country.

Human rights groups have criticized the plan as inhumane and unworkable. After it was challenged in British courts, the U.K. Supreme Court ruled in November that the policy was illegal because Rwanda isn’t a safe country for refugees.

In response to the court ruling, Britain and Rwanda signed a treaty pledging to strengthen protections for migrants. Sunak’s government argues the treaty allows it to pass a law declaring Rwanda a safe destination.

If approved by Parliament, the law would allow the government to "disapply" sections of U.K. human rights law when it comes to Rwanda-related asylum claims and make it harder to challenge the deportations in court.

The bill is sure to face more opposition in coming weeks in the House of Lords, where Sunak’s Conservatives do not have a majority. The Lords can delay and amend legislation but ultimately can’t overrule the elected House of Commons.

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Rwandan officials suggested they were growing tired of the British drama around the deal. President Paul Kagame said it was "the U.K.’s problem, not Rwanda’s problem" that no asylum-seekers have been sent to the country.

"If they don’t come, we can return the money," Kagame told the BBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

A deputy foreign minister in Poland’s previous right-wing government appeared before prosecutors Wednesday to hear charges connected to the alleged sale of visas and work permits to migrants for thousands of dollars, anti-corruption officials said.

The cash-for-visas scandal emerged last summer and undermined the tough-on-immigration stance of the ruling Law and Justice party, which went on to lose power in October parliamentary elections. An investigation was launched earlier last year.

The Central Anti-Corruption Bureau said in a statement Wednesday it had detained the former deputy foreign minister, who had been in charge of consular affairs and who was identified only as Piotr W. because of Polish privacy laws.

POLAND'S PRESIDENT BEGINS PROCESS TO PARDON 2 CONVICTED POLITICIANS

He was brought to the city of Lubin where prosecutors presented him with charges of having exceeded his authority in handling ministry documents, influencing the issuing of Polish visas and sharing classified information with an unauthorized person in 2022-23.

If convicted in a court trial, the defendant could be handed up to 10 years in prison.

The national prosecutor's office later said that the defendant protested his innocence and declined to testify.

He was released on bail. Eight other people have been charged in the case, the anti-corruption office said.

In August, Polish media reported allegations that Poland’s consular sections issued some 250,000 visas to migrants from Asia and Africa since 2021 in return for bribes. At the same time the deputy foreign minister was fired and the media linked him to the scandal.

He has denied any wrongdoing.

Gunmen burst into a home in central Mexico and abducted one of the volunteer searchers looking for the country's 114,000 disappeared and killed her husband and son, authorities said Wednesday.

Search activist Lorenza Cano was abducted from her home in the city of Salamanca, in the north central state of Guanajuato, which has the highest number of homicides in Mexico.

Cano’s volunteer group, Salamanca United in the Search for the Disappeared, said late Tuesday the gunmen shot Cano’s husband and adult son in the attack the previous day.

32 MIGRANTS KIDNAPPED NEAR US-MEXICO BORDER WERE FREED, NOT RESCUED, AMLO CLARIFIES

State prosecutors confirmed the husband and son were killed, and that Cano remained missing.

At least seven volunteer searchers have been killed in Mexico since 2021. The volunteer searchers often conduct their own investigations — often relying on tips from former criminals — because the government has been unable to help.

The searchers usually aren’t trying to convict anyone for their relatives’ abductions; they just want to find their remains.

Cano had spent the last five years searching for her brother, José Cano Flores, who disappeared in 2018. Nothing has been heard of him since then. On Tuesday, Lorenza Cano's photo appeared on a missing persons' flyer, similar to that of her brother's.

Guanajuato state has been the deadliest in Mexico for years, because of bloody turf battles between local gangs and the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

The Mexican government has spent little on looking for the missing. Volunteers must stand in for nonexistent official search teams in the hunt for clandestine graves where cartels hide their victims. The government hasn’t adequately funded or implemented a genetic database to help identify the remains found.

Victims’ relatives rely on anonymous tips — sometimes from former cartel gunmen — to find suspected body-dumping sites. They plunge long steel rods into the earth to detect the scent of death.

If they find something, the most authorities will do is send a police and forensics team to retrieve the remains, which in most cases are never identified.

It leaves the volunteer searchers feeling caught between two hostile forces: murderous drug gangs and a government obsessed with denying the scale of the problem.

In July, a drug cartel used a fake report of a mass grave to lure police into a deadly roadside bomb attack that killed four police officers and two civilians in Jalisco state.

An anonymous caller had given a volunteer searcher a tip about a supposed clandestine burial site near a roadway in Tlajomulco, Jalisco. The cartel buried improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, on the road and then detonated them as a police convoy passed. The IEDS were so powerful they destroyed four vehicles, injured 14 people and left craters in the road.

It is not entirely clear who killed the six searchers slain since 2021. Cartels have tried to intimidate searchers in the past, especially if they went to grave sites that were still being used.

Searchers have long sought to avoid the cartels’ wrath by publicly pledging that they are not looking for evidence to bring the killers to justice, that they simply want their children’s bodies back.

Searchers also say that repentant or former members of the gangs are probably the most effective source of information they have.

Turkmenistan's president fired the country's chief prosecutor for failing to properly fulfill his duties, the official daily reported Wednesday.

President Serdar Berdymukhamedov announced the dismissal during Tuesday's meeting of the State Security Council that reviewed the performance of the Central Asian country's military and law enforcement structures.

ISRAELI EMBASSY OPENS NEAR TURKMENISTAN'S IRAN BORDER

Berdymukhamedov announced that he was firing Prosecutor General Serdar Myalikguliyev for "the failure to properly fulfill his duties and the low level of organization of the prosecutor’s office work," according to the government daily Neutral Turkmenistan. He didn't elaborate further.

Myalikguliyev was appointed in July 2022. He oversaw the investigation into illegal grain deals and a corrupt scheme of air ticket sales, among other high-profile cases.

Begmurat Mukhamedov, who previously served as justice minister and then was elected to parliament and became the head of the parliament's foreign affairs committee, succeeded Myalikguliyev, reported the daily.

Berdymukhamedov, 42, was elected in March 2022 to succeed his father, Gurbanguly, who had run the gas-rich country since 2006.

Turkmenistan has remained largely isolated under autocratic rulers since it became independent after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.