Reform has borrowed several ideas from Donald Trump’s America. The party wants to ramp up oil drilling, scrap diversity initiatives and has launched its own “department of government efficiency” – Doge. On Monday, it unveiled its latest policy: a “deportation command” apparently modelled on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US government agency spearheading Donald Trump’s contentious immigration crackdown.
This body would “track down, detain and deport all illegal migrants in the UK”. In the past year 36,882 people were removed from the UK, and there were 70 charter flights. Most returned voluntarily. Reform’s deportation command says it would detain 24,000 migrants at a time and remove 288,000 annually, running five flights a day. It puts the cost at £2bn a year.
These figures are wildly ambitious. In mid-2024 the average daily cost of holding an individual in immigration detention was £122. Based on this figure, the cost of holding 288,000 people a year would be just under £13bn. This figure doesn’t factor in the cost of rounding up migrants, filling in all the relevant paperwork and actually putting them on flights home.
Reform claims it will bring down the cost by erecting prefab camps in “remote parts of the country”, which it says will cost about £12bn and be ready within 18 months. But building things takes time in the UK. Under the Conservatives, the Home Office planned to increase the number of immigration detention spaces to 5,000. By the time they left office, there were just 2,200. Boris Johnson’s pledge to add 20,000 prison spaces foundered in the planning system.
“Even if you’re just doing the basics, it would still require planning, procurement, staffing, health and education provision, inspection regimes and consenting local communities,” said Shaina Sangha, a researcher at the Institute for Government. “It’s very hard to get the buy-in of communities for this type of accommodation… People don't want to be near those types of sites.”
To speed up deportations, Reform plans to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and disapply several international treaties, including the UN Convention against Torture. It says this would stop “activist judges” holding up forced removals, which are often subject to legal challenges. A new “mass deportation” bill would make people who entered the UK illegally ineligible for asylum.
Sangha predicts that this legislative process would take at least a year and that it would face opposition in the Lords. It could also involve “quite a dramatic curtailment of rights” for British citizens more generally, she said. Withdrawing from the ECHR would have ramifications for the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland and the Brexit deal, too.
“Reformers say they’re going to sweep away some of the legal impediments, and it may be that they can do something about that,” said Alan Manning, the former chair of the Migration Advisory Committee. “But I think they're still being optimistic about how easy it is. These people almost always do not have any documents on them. You need to get another country to issue documents, and that country usually has no particular interest in doing this promptly.”
Over the past four years, some 70% of enforced returns have been to five countries: Albania, Romania, Brazil, India and Poland. Others have dragged their feet when it comes to taking people back. Reform plans to threaten them with visa bans, similar to those imposed by Trump. This could prompt retaliatory visa embargoes that affect British businesses, said Manning.
“You need some enforcement of immigration laws, but in practice this is very, very hard,” he said. “Personally, I think it should be much more based on employment and stricter right-to-work checks.”
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If Reform does manage to get the physical, legislative and diplomatic groundwork in place, it would face another issue: finding people to deport. Madeleine Sumption, the director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, points out that most deportees are known to the authorities. They include people who have been refused asylum or overstayed visas.
“You have other people who’ve lived in the country for a long time, who are completely under the radar, and the question is, how does the government find them?” she said.
Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, has ruled out Ice-style raids that have resulted in miscarriages of justice and deaths in the US. But Sumption says deporting hundreds of thousands of people is not possible without “some kind of proactive measures that pick up people and work who is a citizen or a person with a visa and who is here without permission.”
These operations are costly and inefficient. Despite increasing Ice’s budget from some $8bn in 2024 to about $28bn, deportation numbers under Donald Trump are similar to those during the last two years of the Biden administration.
Jean-François, professor of politics and international relations at Queen Mary University of London, said Reform’s deportation is “performative”, echoing the showmanship of Trump. “They’ve clocked that, for a long time, their appeal is not so much about competence or delivering the things they are promising. It's more about the kind of promises they are making and being seen to have the courage to bring contentious issues to the table.
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