Could Farage bring ICE-style deportations to the UK? – The Latest

0:00Lucy Hough:This is The Guardian.

0:11Lucy Hough:Hundreds of thousands, millions of people potentially would be at risk of deportation.

0:16Nigel Farage:We will create a new agency, UK Deportation Command, which will have just one mission, to track down and attain those in this country illegally.

0:24Lucy Hough:So a lot of people who are here completely legally at risk of deportation as well, and actually makes it much more extreme than the policies that Donald Trump is pursuing in the US.

0:36Jessica Elgot:Reform UK has announced plans for an ICE-style agency that could deport hundreds of thousands of people every year. Plans that Labour have condemned as divisive and un-British. From the Guardians today in Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hoth. I'm joined by Jessica Elgott, The Guardian's Deputy Political Editor.

0:56Zia Yusuf:Thanks so much for dialing in from Parliament, Jessica. It's great to see you. So Zia Youssef just stood up in Dover at a press conference with Shadow Home Secretary, this being of course a Reform UK press conference, announcing a new ICE-style agency dedicated to deporting thousands of people.

1:17Jessica Elgot:These are plans that seem alarming and extreme. Tell me about what Zia Yusuf has announced today.

1:24Lucy Hough:I mean, it's not reform, don't use that term, but it's clear what this agency is modelled on. He says he would create this agency, the UK Deportation Command, which will be dedicated to deporting hundreds of thousands of people, as well as alongside their policy of terminating the status of all of those people with indefinite leave to remain. So all of those hundreds of thousands, millions of people, potentially, once you add all of these measures together, would be at risk of deportation if they don't then meet the strict criteria for renewable five-year visas, which would have a quite high income threshold, much higher than than currently.

2:05That also puts a lot of people who are here completely legally at risk of

2:11Lucy Hough:deportation as well, and actually makes it much more extreme than the policies that Donald Trump is pursuing in the US, because that would be like Donald Trump deciding to sort of unilaterally revoke the green card status of millions of legally settled Americans and put new thresholds in place for them to be settled. That's what reform's proposing here. So if anything, it's more extreme.

2:36Zia Yusuf:Gosh. And is there any detail of how this would work? I mean, they are talking about capacity to detain 24 ,000 migrants at a time, with deportations nearly at 300 ,000 annually on five flights a day. So I mean, you touched on it there, but putting that all together over a five-year parliament, that could be in excess of a million people.

2:58Lucy Hough:It's worth saying at this point that almost no expert or analysis in the country that's looked at this in depth thinks that this is possible. So as of April 2024, there are about 2 ,500 detention spaces in the UK at the moment. So to increase the capacity to detain 24 ,000 migrants at a time is an enormous and probably unworkable expansion of capacity. they say that they would have to be five flights a day you know which is many magnitudes more than there is now in order to support up to 288 000 people annually and you know i think that obviously what these proposals are designed to do is to kind of grab headlines and to to sort of lay out the scale of the problem which goes far beyond you know what any other political party is is proposing but you know by any measure this would cost billions and billions of pounds and that's before you get to how much it would sort of tear the fabrics of communities apart once you know people who have been legally settled here for many years working here sending their children to school suddenly find themselves potentially facing deportation because they're for example under an earnings threshold.

4:11Zia Yusuf:This would be a UK deportation command so thousands of agents, officers on the streets of Britain finding and identifying people who are at risk of deportation. That is something Rupert Lowe, who was previously the MP for Great Yarmouth for Reform UK, has spoken about mass deportations. Nigel Farage last year said it was a political impossibility.

4:38Jessica Elgot:So what does it tell us that on principle Reform UK is prepared to use language such as this and to create fairly detailed policy about mass deportations in the UK, even if, as you say, they would be very difficult to put into practice?

4:55Lucy Hough:Look, there is still a difference, I think, to what Rupert Lowe and what reform were proposing. At the moment, it still remains unclear exactly whether reform intends to pursue exactly the kind of ISA tactics that we've seen used across states in the US, where people literally grabbed off the street, you know, and only checked later whether potentially that they are illegally in the country or not. Initially, Farage kind of rejected the language of mass deportations sort of purely on workability grounds. He seems over the course of the time since he fell out with Rupert Lowe to have become much more comfortable with using that kind of language.

5:33Lucy Hough:Zia Yusuf, who is now his Home Affairs spokesman, has been comfortable with using that language. And lots of what was announced today is very similar to what they announced over the summer, something which they called was Operation Restoring Justice, which was a kind of a long term policy paper that they put together based on how, you know, a sort of deportations on this scale might work. But, you know, Rupert Lowe, he's talked in the language of millions and millions of deportations.

6:02Zia Yusuf:What does the polling suggest on the extent to which the British public currently supports an increased number of deportations such as this? Because we've carried out about 60 ,000 or just less than 60 ,000 deportations focused on people who've been denied asylum or people who are foreign offenders. 58 ,000 since 2024. So the numbers that we're talking about here would be enormously higher than that.

6:29Lucy Hough:attitudes from British people towards immigration are pretty hard line at the moment. I think almost half said that they would support a immigration system where there were no more new migrants admitted at all and large numbers were required to leave. You know, the kinds of people that UK voters want to actually see leaving the UK tend to be people who either arrived here in order to claim benefits, which is, you know, again, we know that it's a very, very, very small number of people on indefinite leave to remain who are currently claiming, who are part of the sort of overall number of people claiming universal credit.

7:04Lucy Hough:I think it's something like 2.7%. They want to see people deported who arrived in small boats or people who came here without any kind of valid visa. That number starts to shrink a bit when it comes to for people who have been genuinely fleeing persecution. And then it starts to get smaller and smaller when you ask people What about foreign students? What about people who are here on work visas to look after sort of people in care homes, people who are here to work as nurses or doctors? That starts to shrink, you know, to very, very small numbers. Actually, a lot of it depends on the on the context in terms of what people want to see.

7:44Lucy Hough:And I think, you know, the idea that people could have their legally settled status revoked once people have come and probably paid quite a lot of money to get that status and have on a here in a stable job. That is, I think, something that a lot of Britons sort of feel instinctively like is not a fair application of the rules.

8:08Zia Yusuf:Jess, I mean, a lot of this is posturing ahead of the next general election, obviously some years away. But I mean, current polling would suggest that we are on course for a Reform UK government. So even if we are dealing in semantics, we do have to take these things seriously, don't we?

8:25Lucy Hough:Absolutely. And I think that, you know, you have to, when people tell you what they're going to do, you should on balance believe them if they're bidding to be the next government. And we can argue all we like about how unworkable the plans are. But we should at least expect Reform UK, if they were to form the next government, to attempt to enact what they say they will enact when it comes to deportations, when it comes to reforming human rights law, when it comes to, you know, reforming immigration law. I mean, you know, you can be in no doubt that if reform had a majority government, they would seek to make these changes to indefinite leave to remain.

9:03Lucy Hough:I mean, Labour is already making significant changes to indefinitely to remain, making it needing to be 10 years rather than five in order to achieve that settled status. We would expect them, of course, to leave the European Convention of Human Rights and to rip up all sorts of different other kinds of rights law that protects, that means that people have the right to appeal when these kinds of new laws are applied. So, of course, I think it's very unlikely that you'd have a reformed government able to deport the sheer numbers of people that they say they would be able to deport from a standing star.

9:38Lucy Hough:But we should expect them to attempt to do so.

9:42Jessica Elgot:Well, Jess, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. That's it for today. My huge thanks again to Jessica Elgert, The Guardian's deputy political editor. You can keep up with her work and that of our politics team over at TheGuardian.com. And do have a listen to today's episode of Politics Weekly UK, where our colleagues Pippa Creera and Kieran Stacey are reporting on Labour's controversial reforms to special educational needs. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Latest, the new evening edition of Today in Focus. Today in Focus will be back with you as usual tomorrow morning. The Latest will be back tomorrow night.

10:15Jessica Elgot:This episode was presented by me, Lucy Hoff. The producer was Brian E. Moore. The senior producer was Ryan Ramgobin. The lead producer was Zoe Hitch.

10:28Lucy Hough:This is The Guardian.