Nigel Farage has pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of people who have successfully claimed asylum after coming to the UK on small boats if he wins the next election.
Reform UK said it would review all successful asylum claims going back five years to assess whether people entered illegally or overstayed their visas and then claimed asylum and whether their country of origin is now deemed safe.
If any of the three conditions are met, their leave to remain will be revoked. Reform estimates that 400,000 people will be “in scope” of the review, the majority of whom will be deported.
Reform has already committed itself to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and derogating from the Refugee Convention, both of which are used by people to claim asylum.
Migrants are brought ashore in Dover on April 13Gareth Fuller/PA
Zia Yusuf, Reform’s shadow home secretary, said: “For years, Tory and Labour governments have presided over an invasion of Britain.
“They have effectively operated an open borders policy. Instead of upholding the law, they have rewarded those who broke it by entering Britain illegally.
“Reform will reverse this. Today we announce that a Reform government will review the previous five years of asylum grants, and anyone who broke into the country illegally or overstayed on another visa will be stripped of their status and deported. We will do what it takes to restore justice in Britain.”
Zia Yusuf suggested the policy would help to “restore justice in Britain”Thomas Krych/Anadolu via Getty Images
Reform UK previously pledged to identify and deport all illegal migrants in the UK. The party has said that it will introduce Operation Restoring Justice to “track down, identify and deport all illegal migrants in the UK”. The effort would be led by a new removals agency with the capacity to hold 24,000 migrants in detention at any one time.
Yusuf has also previously said that a Reform UK government would introduce legislation to ban all face coverings in public, including the burqa and other religious dress that covers the face, although he said the party had not yet decided its final policy on the issue. It risks reopening previous debates about the enforcement of a ban on face coverings, such as whether it would extend to personal protection equipment used by beekeepers.
Reform rejected comparisons between his proposed UK Deportation Command and Donald Trump’s use of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to round up illegal migrants, which has resulted in the fatal shootings of two US citizens during protests. Yusuf said it was “very tempting” and “somewhat inevitable” for people to make the comparison between Reform’s model and the US, but that the UK did not have the same problems with firearms and policing was “much more” by consent.
He told The Times this year: “It’s just not true. We would not expect UK Deportation Command to carry weapons. It’s not going to be the case.”
There has been no official study to calculate the illegal migration population in the UK since 2005, when the population of “unauthorised” people in the country was estimated to be between 310,000 and 570,000. However, unofficial research carried out since then has estimated that there could be as many as 1.2 million people living in the UK illegally.
Reform would aim to deport 188,000 illegal migrants a year by operating five removal flights a day and an RAF jet would be on standby in case of mechanical problems. This would also help towards the party’s goal of net emigration, where more people will leave the country than arrive. The last time the UK recorded net negative migration was in 1993.