last week\u2019s Home Office figures, external<\/a> that showed there have been a total of 58,539 \u201creturns\u201d since Labour won the general election.<\/p>\n\n
The Home Office uses the term \u201creturns\u201d to cover anyone who leaves the UK after losing the right to live or work here. That can happen for a range of reasons, including an expired visa, a refused asylum claim, or a criminal conviction leading to deportation.<\/p>\n
But not all of these people have been \u201cremoved\u201d. These figures include people who leave the UK on their own, sometimes with financial support from the government – some qualify for up to \u00a33,000 to help with resettlement costs. Some of those who leave voluntarily do so without the Home Office\u2019s knowledge at the time. <\/p>\n
Of the people the government claims to have removed in the latest figures, 43,000 left voluntarily after being told they were in the UK illegally. Only 15,200 were removed by force. The number of returns also fell in January, driven largely by a drop in voluntary returns. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How many illegal migrants have been \u2018removed\u2019 by the government?published at 15:40 GMT 15:40 GMT Nicholas BarrettBBC Verify…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-420349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}