Sweden has confirmed 458 British citizens have been deported or forcibly removed by police since Brexit. It is the first time the scale of the deportations of citizens who failed to secure residency in Sweden post-Brexit has been made public and comes amid mounting criticism of a cruel and hardline approach to Britons who had chosen to make the country their home before Brexit. Some have been told to go after more than 25 years in the country and even vulnerable elderly people with dementia have been affected.
One man was deported even though he had lived in the country since he was 10 years old. Susanna Fonsell, a unit manager and legal expert at the Swedish Migration Agency, told Sverige Radio: “A rejected application does not necessarily result in deportation… and according to the agency statistics, the agency’s rejections of an application for resident status has been accomplished by a deportation decision in only approximately 400 cases,” she told Sweden Radio. The Migrationsverket, the Swedish government agency responsible for migration, confirmed to the Guardian that 458 British citizens had been deported since Brexit.
David Milstead, who heads up the 9,000-strong activist group Brits in Sweden, said it was important for Sweden to release full and transparent figures in relation to removals and deportations and their circumstances. Does it capture people who gave up and left when they realised their withdrawal agreement application was unlikely to succeed? Does it include people who were refused withdrawal agreement status, subsequently obtained a permit under national law and were only later ordered to leave?
The last available data shows that there were 14,233 applications for post Brexit residency, which included family members joining British citizens after the deadline by 2024. Of those, just under 4,000 were rejected, a refusal rate three times higher than any other member state and considerably higher than the EU average of between 3% and 4%, according to Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) analysis. Deportations are still happening.
This week, the Swedish wife of a former business director from Cambridge told how her husband was detained in Stockholm on Tuesday ahead of a forced removal. She said they had been fighting to overturn the decision by the migration authorities for five years and felt that they had been “hunted”. Earlier this week, the Guardian revealed a 34-year-old British man, John Sellers, who had lived in Sweden since he was 10, had been deported, separating him from his wife, Caroline, in Gothenburg, who said people needed to know how Brexit had “crushed families”.
Another woman, 78-year-old British widow Joyce Thomas, has been told to remove herself from the country before next Wednesday. Friends are trying to get an injunction and have appealed to the European Commission for help. If she fails to comply, not only will she face a forced deportation, but the court of appeal has told her she could face a “re-entry ban” and be “registered on a watchlist” preventing potential entry into a Schengen country, which includes Sweden “as long as the re-entry ban remains in effect”.
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