Immigration Raids and Mass Deportations: The Trans-Atlantic Consensus on Unauthorised and Undocumented Migrants
During January 2025, Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams raided 828 premises across the UK, including nail bars, car washes, restaurants, and vape shops. In a record-breaking month, 609 people were arrested, up from 352 the previous January. In July 2024, newly appointed Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had announced her intention to intensify Immigration Enforcement operations and to target car washes and sections of the beauty sector in the search for unauthorised migrants. A new Returns and Enforcement Unit has since been set up with a thousand “redeployed” employees, with a remit to remove unauthorised migrants from the UK. In a recent surge of activity, between 20 and 23 November 2024, Immigration Enforcement officers visited 235 premises and arrested 154 illegal workers as part of the ongoing Operation Tornado. As of 10 February 2025, nearly 19,000 failed asylum seekers, foreign criminals and other immigration offenders have been returned by the Labour government to countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.
According to the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, there are four categories of unauthorised migrants in the UK: those who overstay their visas, those who enter illegally, those who do not leave after failed asylum applications, and those who are born in the UK to unauthorised migrants. It is generally accepted that the quoted numbers of unauthorised migrants are inaccurate, and can vary according to the way in which they are defined. The Pew Research Center estimated that there were between 800,000 and 1.2 million ‘irregular immigrants’ in the UK in 2017.
Across the Atlantic, immigration enforcement has also been hotting up, and with a greater sense of urgency. The US is home to more unauthorised migrants than any other country in the world, with an estimated 11 million as of 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, who account for 3.3 per cent of the total U.S. population. Unauthorised migrants either lack a valid immigration visa or entered the US illegally. The five leading contributors to this American subpopulation are Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, and Honduras. Undocumented immigrants could hitherto secure legal status by claiming asylum or temporary protected status, or by being granted presidential amnesties but this will no longer be possible under the Trump administration. Whichever way you look at it, unauthorised migration is widely considered untenable and has many serious social, economic, and humanitarian consequences, quite apart from the alleged criminality that so troubles President Trump.
On 23 January 2025, four removal flights to Mexico and another three to Guatemala of people detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) kicked off what is likely to be a costly and time-consuming exercise, driven by threats if recipient countries do not cooperate. According to Newsweek, deportations at the current rate will take 28 years to remove all undocumented immigrants from America. Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro initially refused to accept two US military planes carrying Colombian returnees, only to backtrack after President Trump threatened punitive tariffs on Colombian exports to the US. At the time of writing, repatriation flights have returned undocumented migrants to Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Panama, and Venezuela. Deportees include convicted criminals, those awaiting conviction, as well as many more without any criminal history.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations began on 26 January 2025 in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Miami, and New York City. ICE officers are empowered to target workplaces, schools, churches, and hospitals and conduct “targeted arrests” of undocumented migrants. The sanctuary cities of Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC have been singled out by ICE, given their traditional lack of cooperation with the federal authorities in enforcing immigration law.
Concerns over the levels of immigration and rising numbers of unauthorised and undocumented immigrants are not uncommon, especially during periods of economic downturn. As part of his MAGA project, President Trump has thus declared a national emergency at the US-Mexico border, expanded immigration enforcement procedures, limited birthright citizenship, suspended the admission of refugees, and revoked rights for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival) recipients and those with or eligible for TPS (Temporary Protected Status).
The UK and US governments have stepped up, in both scope and scale, historical anti-immigrant procedures in response to recent populist sentiments. The UK did not attract large numbers of immigrants until the 1950s, making detention and deportation policies largely redundant. Starting in the 1970s, so-called “passport raids” targeted boarding houses, restaurants, and textile factories. Since then, periodic dawn raids and workplace raids have led to deportations, as well as substantial fines for those who taken on employees without proper pre-employment checks on their eligibility to work in the UK. Non-British, non-Irish nationals sentenced to at least 12 months’ imprisonment for a criminal offence in the UK, with certain exceptions, are also subject to ‘automatic deportation.’
On the other hand, the US has much greater experience with mass deportation and mass detention, even though it is a nation of immigrants. Left-wing radicals were targeted by the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, and Mexicans were deported or encouraged to leave during the Great Depression of the 1930s and again during Operation Wetback in the 1950s. More recently, 2 million were deported during the Trump first administration, while his predecessor, “deporter-in-chief” Obama deported 3.1 million in his first term and 2. 8 million in his second term. Biden deported as many as 4.7 million. Deportations from the US include voluntary returns, who choose to depart without a formal order of removal after acknowledging unlawful entry into the US, and enforced removals, who are arrested in their homes, workplaces, or communities and legally ordered to leave the country. A removal order is enforced by ICE or CBP and prohibits re-entry to the US.
Supporters of liberal immigration policies attribute labour shortages, lost tax revenues, and reduced consumer spending to the repatriation of ‘illegal’ migrants. The reality is that many undocumented and unauthorised migrants are seriously disadvantaged, vulnerable to people trafficking and illegal working practices that may amount to modern slavery, and denied the usual rights of citizens, such as the ability to work without restrictions, to access welfare benefits and healthcare, to vote in elections, to hold a passport and travel freely, and to live otherwise normal lives without the fear of detention and deportation.
Unauthorised immigration reflects a failure of border control, a continued demand for low-paid and low-skilled workers, and the growth of social support networks and parallel economies within certain immigrant communities. If undocumented and unauthorised immigration are indeed a concern, some form of biometric identification for all citizens may help ensure in future that those without genuine rights of residence in a country cannot evade the reach of law enforcement and immigration authorities. Meanwhile, we have to live with the consequences of the past as we try to redress them as best as we can.
Ashis Banerjee