Reader Contribution: UK DEPORTATION COMMAND: The Great British ICE

What Reform UK is not telling you

Jan 29, 2026

Thursdays are now reader contributions here at Bearly Politics. Today’s submission is from Brown Reporter who runs a fantastic Substack with all your news provided in five minutes or less. He is well worth a follow if you need a quick update on what’s happening in politics today.

black car on asphalt road — Photo by Nikolay Dimitrov on Unsplash

On January 7, 2026, 37-year-old Renee Good, an American citizen, mother of three, and award-winning poet, was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. She wasn’t smuggling anyone, she was protesting. Just over two weeks later, on January 24, it happened again. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who dedicated his life to caring for veterans, was shot dead by federal agents in the same city while trying to assist a woman who had been shoved to the ground during a raid.

In both cases, the machinery of the state worked efficiently, not to investigate the killings, but to justify them. The administration labelled both Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists” using the weight of the federal government to posthumously criminalise citizens for the act of dissent. These tragedies are not anomalies, they are the inevitable output of a specific type of enforcement model. It is a system so aggressive and unaccountable that it ends up targeting the very citizens it claims to protect.

As a migrant who calls the UK his home, I look at Minneapolis and see a warning, because if Reform UK gets its way, this is exactly the machinery they intend to build here.

What Reform Actually Wants to Build

In August 2025, Reform UK released a blueprint titled “Operation Restoring Justice” which explicitly seeks to replicate the US’s ICE model in Britain under the name “UK Deportation Command”. The document is remarkably candid in its desire to copy what it believes works in America, yet it glosses over the operational reality of that system.

Reform’s proposal outlines a militarised enforcement unit with powers that would fundamentally alter British policing. They envision mass raids on homes and workplaces, supported by a detention-on-arrest policy that denies bail. To facilitate this, they propose a surveillance infrastructure based on “cutting-edge data fusion”. In practice, this means the automatic sharing of NHS records, bank details, and tax information between government agencies without individual warrants, alongside mandatory biometric capture at any police encounter.

The scale of this ambition is staggering. The plan calls for the rapid construction of 24,000 detention spaces in remote parts of the country to support a target of up to 600,000 deportations over five years. This is not merely a policy adjustment, it is an attempt to industrialise deportation.

What ICE Actually Looks Like in Practice

Before Britain considers importing this model, we must examine the “success” Reform wishes to emulate. The problem is that the American model operates under quota systems that prioritise quantity over accuracy, often with fatal results. The year 2025 was the deadliest in ICE custody in two decades, with more than 30 people losing their life in custody, largely attributed to medical neglect, inadequate care or worsening of pre-existing conditions. Some weren’t even scheduled for deportation when they died.

More distinctively, the pressure to meet enforcement targets, where agents are told to “turn the creative knob up to 11”, has led to a “dragnet” effect. Data analysis by The New York Times and Cato Institute reveals that nearly 65% to 70% of ICE arrests involve individuals with zero criminal convictions. These are not “the worst of the worst,” as promised, but often people who were simply in the wrong place when agents needed to hit a quota. Most alarmingly, a ProPublica investigation revealed that ICE has held over 170 American citizens against their will.

This is the system Reform wants to import: one where the drive for numbers overrides due process, catching innocent people and citizens in its gears.

Why the Numbers Don’t Add Up

Beyond the human cost, Reform’s numbers simply do not add up. Their target requires five deportation flights every single day - a rate of 240 deportations daily. Operational reality suggests this is a fantasy. Maintaining this would require five jumbo jets operating year-round, each carrying 158 people plus security personnel. That’s triple the capacity of current deportation flights, which already struggle to fill seats.

Here’s where the proposal confronts an uncomfortable reality: nobody knows how many undocumented people are in the UK. Not Reform. Not the Home Office. Not anyone. Many are in genuinely vulnerable situations, some trapped in what essentially amounts to modern slavery. Not exactly the easiest group to locate and process.

Furthermore, the “cutting-edge data fusion” required to find these individuals poses a severe threat to privacy. Reform proposes giving the state sweeping access to personal data currently protected by law. Their proposal for mandatory biometric capture at any police encounter goes well beyond what officers can currently do without making an arrest. When the government recently attempted to introduce Digital IDs, public backlash forced a U-turn, yet Reform thinks that the public will accept the mandatory harvesting of fingerprints, retinal scans and facial scans without any questions.

We have seen the consequences of this “shoot first, check later” approach before. The Windrush scandal, where the government had to pay over £105 million in compensation, was the direct result of aggressive policies targeting people who were here legally. History warns us that casting too wide a net rarely ends well, yet Reform proposes a net wider than anything we have seen before.

Why Britain Should Be More Worried Than America

What makes Reform’s proposal particularly concerning in the British context is what’s missing: a written constitution. There’s no foundational legal text in the UK that says ‘the state can’t do this.’ In the US, you can point to constitutional protections. In Britain, we’re working with an uncodified constitution and conventions that can be eroded through parliamentary legislation.

What we do have is a pattern of government agencies gradually expanding into territories they’re given power to enter. The “hostile environment” wasn’t built to deport millions. It was built to make life difficult for vulnerable people. It ended up destroying families, including the Windrush generation, British citizens deported because of bureaucratic failures.

A “UK Deportation Command” won’t magically stay within its remit. It will expand. It will develop its own bureaucratic incentives. It will find reasons to expand its powers.

The Brexit Echo - Why We Should Know Better

Britain has recent experience with grand promises about complex policy. In 2016, Liam Fox declared Brexit negotiations would be “the easiest in human history.” In 2019, Boris Johnson called the Brexit deal “oven-ready”. The reality delivered £210 added to household food bills annually, a 20% drop in EU exports, 159 pages of non-tariff barrier guidance, ongoing disputes, and seven years of negotiation for something promised to be simple.

Reform is using the same rhetorical structure. “Just build a Deportation Command” - as if America’s experience doesn’t exist. “The costs will work out” - despite detention costing more than hotel accommodation. “Activists can’t block flights anymore” - ignoring that every deportation case requires legal process, and wrongful detention cases cost millions. “We’ll solve illegal immigration” - while ignoring that the vast majority of immigration is legal, with estimates putting illegal migration at 4 to 5 percent of total inflow.

The pattern is: take something genuinely complex and present it as simple. Promise quick action. When it gets complicated, blame “activists” and “woke lawyers” obscuring the reality that the plan was flawed from the start.

The difference is: Brexit was about economics. This is about the state’s power to detain, search, and deport people. And the consequences are far more serious.

The Conversation We Should Be Having Right Now

We must be honest about the conversation we are having. It is valid to discuss legal migration levels and fair asylum processing. It is entirely different to discuss creating a machinery that incentivises the arrest of innocent people and shields the state from accountability when it kills them.

Reform argues this is necessary, that Britain faces an “open-ended drain on the exchequer” and mass deportation is the answer. But the harder conversation involves questions their document doesn’t address. Do we want legal migration? How much? Which sectors require it? How should asylum claims be processed fairly? How do we enforce immigration law without building machinery that inevitably catches innocent people in its gears?

Reform’s proposal doesn’t engage with any of this. It offers a simple solution to a complex problem, modelled on a system that produces thirty-two deaths per year in custody, detains its own citizens with no criminal records, and operates on quotas that prioritize numbers over accuracy.

In Britain, it would look similar. Different language (a bit posher), same machinery. Same incentives. Same pressures.

Renee and Alex had papers. They had citizenship. They had a family. The system didn’t care.

That’s what ICE looks like. That’s what Reform wants to import. And unlike Brexit, you don’t get a do-over when someone’s dead.

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