Why Reform wants to bring its own version of ICE to British streets

In the past few months, Reform UK has made a big song and dance about broadening its expertise on topics like the economy and foreign affairs.

It’s all part of an effort to project competency and professionalism as the party seeks to convince voters it is prepared to take control if it wins the next general election.

But amid all this noise, Reform figures know which issue they can thank for launching them to the top of the polls soon after the 2024 election: immigration.

Today, Zia Yusuf – the party’s newly appointed home affairs spokesman – has set out how exactly he plans to drive down the number of people coming to live in the UK.

With right-wing challengers including Restore Britain and even the Conservatives also trying to take advantage of voter anger over migration, he’s under pressure to get it right.

Yusuf has evidently arrived at the conclusion that Reform’s tactics must be hardline.

Dismissing some very bad press for Donald Trump’s ICE agents since the start of the year, the former party chairman has proposed creating an equivalent force to drive a mass deportation effort in the UK.

It would be called UK Deportation Command, and it will have the capacity to detain 24,000 people at any one time – roughly the population of Falmouth in Cornwall.

There would be up to five flights each day to deport up to 288,000 people per year.

Yusuf told a press conference in Dover today there are ‘some things that we would not, obviously, emulate from the American approach to mass deportation’, without specifying what those things would be.

Visas would stop being issued for countries such as Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Sudan that refuse to take back nationals who have been deported from the UK.

And as previously announced, indefinite leave to remain would be scrapped and replaced with a visa that only lasts five years before it needs to be renewed.

What is the current situation with immigration to the UK?

Much of Zia Yusuf’s speech today focused on illegal migration via small boats, but he also devoted a bit of time to decrying the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of legal migrants who arrived under the post-Brexit system.

But recent clampdowns on visa rules under both the Conservatives and Labour have already resulted in a drastic fall in net migration numbers.

In fact, it is predicted that net migration to the UK could turn negative in the next few years, meaning more people are leaving the country than arriving to live here.

The prospect has even prompted concern from some economists, who worry the economy will shrink with fewer workers arriving from around the world as the British population ages.

It is, of course, a different story for illegal migration – last year, almost 41,500 people arrived in the UK by small boat, which was a 13% increase on 2024 and the second-highest annual figure on record.

The Labour government has tried to drive this number down with its ‘one in, one out’ deal with France and by disrupting supply chains.

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