Reform UK vows to Deport Children under Proposed Migration Plan

Children would also be subject to Reform UK’s plan for mass deportations from Britain, Nigel Farage has said.

The MP launched the party’s “Operation Restoring Justice”, billed as a five-year emergency programme to detain and deport illegal migrants and deter future arrivals if Reform were elected to government.

Around 600,000 asylum seekers could be deported in the first parliament of a Reform UK government, Mr Farage claimed.

Asked whether this would include women and unaccompanied children, he said:

“Yes, women and children, everybody on arrival will be detained.

“And I’ve accepted already that how we deal with children is a much more complicated and difficult issue.

“But you know what the people protesting outside the Bell Hotel and at 30 migrant hotels on Saturday around the country weren’t doing it because of the few children coming.

“They were doing it because over three-quarters of those that come are young undocumented males who come from cultures that are entirely different from ours, who are very unlikely to assimilate into our community, who pose a risk to women and girls, and some of them, I’m afraid, pose a risk to national security. So it’s pretty clear, I think, what our priorities are.”

His comments were met with condemnation from charities and opposition parties.

Kolbassia Haoussou, from charity Freedom from Torture, said: “This is not who we are as a country.

“Men, women and children are coming to the UK looking for safety. They are fleeing the unimaginable horrors of torture in places like Afghanistan, Sudan and Iran. And they desperately need our protection.”

Responding to Reform saying it would disapply the Refugee Convention and the Convention Against Torture, he added:

“These laws were created in the aftermath of the Second World War to protect us all. If Britain were to abandon this legacy, it would hand repressive regimes around the world a gift.”

The Liberal Democrats also criticised the proposals. Deputy leader Daisy Cooper said Mr Farage’s plan “crumbles under the most basic scrutiny”.

She added: “The idea that Reform UK is going to magic up some new places to detain people and deport them to, but don’t have a clue where those places would be, is taking the public for fools.”

She claimed that “Winston Churchill would be turning in his grave” over the plan to rip up the human rights convention.

Labour ministers labelled the proposals “unworkable gimmicks”.

Under the proposals, Reform UK pledged to scale up detention capacity for asylum seekers to 24,000 and secure deals with countries including Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran to return migrants.

The party claimed the plan would cost £10 billion to implement but save £7 billion currently spent on illegal migration over five years.

Reform also said it would leave the European Convention on Human Rights and replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, applying only to British citizens and those legally in the UK.

It would also introduce legislation to make everyone arriving illegally ineligible for asylum and allow detention until deportation. Previous Conservative governments had already introduced laws barring some asylum claims under the Illegal Migration Act.

Mr Farage said the only way to stop small boat arrivals is by “detaining and deporting absolutely anyone that comes via that route”.

“And if we do that, the boats will stop coming within days, because there will be no incentive to pay a trafficker to get into this country.

“If you come to the UK illegally, you will be detained and deported and never, ever allowed to stay, period. That is our big message from today.”

After winning the general election, Labour accused the Tories of creating an asylum backlog likened to “Hotel California”, with thousands of migrants stuck in taxpayer-funded hotels.