Nigel Farage has unveiled his flagship plan for mass deportations if he becomes prime minister.

Referred to as Operation Restoring Justice, this initiative involves prohibiting anyone arriving by small boat from seeking asylum in the UK, with plans to detain and then deport them, along with many others who have already settled in the country unlawfully.

Reform UK suggests this would entail a £10 billion investment over five years and potentially save taxpayers up to £42 billion over ten years by closing asylum hotels.

The Daily Mail looks at the key points, costs and feasibility of each aspect. 

Nigel Farage (pictured) has unveiled his flagship plan for mass deportations if he becomes prime minister

Migrant families wade into the sea in an attempt to board a small boat on August 12, 2025 in Gravelines, France

Reform UK claims it would involve an outlay of £10 billion over five years and end up saving taxpayers as much as £42 billion over a decade

ASYLUM BAN

Under Reform’s Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill, anyone entering Britain illegally, such as by crossing the Channel in a small boat or concealing themselves in a lorry, would be labeled as ‘ineligible for asylum’.

The party claims this means the Home Office, immigration tribunals and higher courts could not ‘even consider claims’.

This approach is feasible because a similar law was enacted by the previous Conservative government, which barred migrants arriving after March 7, 2023, from being granted protection.

However, it merely created a large cohort of people left in limbo as the vast majority were not deported. 

COMPULSORY DETENTION

All those who arrive in dinghies would be ‘detained until they are deported’, costing an estimated £2 billion over five years.

This represents a significant shift from the current protocol, where immigration detention is a last resort, with the majority of illegal migrants accommodated in hotels or leased residences.

Reform UK states it will establish authorities to permit extended detention by bypassing the Hardial Singh principles, stemming from a pivotal 1983 case that ‘activist lawyers’ leverage to obtain bail for their clients.

This attempt to overrule a long-established legal precedent would likely be an early focus of legal challenges to Reform’s plan.

REMOVAL CENTRES

Mr Farage, on a stage adorned with mock departure boards for deportation flights, said he would ‘detain and deporting absolutely anyone’ that comes to Britain via small boat

Nigel Farage has vowed to introduce US-style raids to track down illegal immigrants living in Britain

There are currently only around 2,000 beds in the UK’s seven Immigration Removal Centres but Reform wants to create capacity for 24,000 detainees within 18 months, including women and children.

It has budgeted for £2 billion to be spent on ‘detention construction’ over five years.

It wants to build new Secure Immigration Removal Centres (SIRC) in ‘remote parts of the country’ with ‘basic’ but ‘not punitive’ conditions and robust perimeters to prevent escapes.

But Reform will not say where the sites will be, for fear that the Government will buy up the land, and experts question where acceptable locations could be found.

Most of the last Tory government’s attempts to create large holding centres for migrants ended in failure, with a recent report by MPs claiming £100 million was wasted.

The Bibby Stockholm barge was abandoned, while locals – and Nigel Farage – objected to proposals to use the former Dambusters base, RAF Scampton, in Lincolnshire.

DEPORTATION FLIGHTS

The Home Office would put on five charter flights a day under Reform’s plans, with the RAF keeping one Voyager aircraft as a ‘hot spare’ if a commercial charter breaks down. 

The party says it will spend £1.5 billion over the course of the Parliament on charter flights, escorts and logistics.

But former Border Force director general Tony Smith said: ‘They’re going to have to use military aircraft because they won’t be able to get enough commercial ones, but they will have to be adapted because they don’t have enough seats.’

Home Office sources say that most current enforced deportation flights only carry about 50 people, each requiring one or two escorts to guard them.

If Reform wants to deport as many as 288,000 people a year, as senior party figure Zia Yusuf stated, they would need to put more than 150 people on each flight and have five taking off every day of the year.

RETURN DEALS

Recent weeks have seen protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers across Britain, including at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex

One of the biggest differences between Reform’s plan and those of the Tories and Labour is its desire to deport people to any country in the world.

Currently, the UK rarely sends illegal migrants back to places where they risk being persecuted, tortured or executed – but Reform has said it has no such qualms.

It pointed out that Germany has begun deporting criminals to Taliban-run Afghanistan, and would also seek deals with the Iranian regime and the dictatorship of Eritrea.

Reform would make securing new returns deals the Foreign Office’s top priority and use a ‘carrot and stick’ approach, with more aid money given to countries that co-operate while visas will be withheld and even sanctions considered for those that refuse.

It plans to set aside £2 billion over five years for ‘diplomatic incentives’. Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said deals with the Taliban would be unpopular with the public and risked damaging Britain’s international reputation, which could jeopardise existing arrangements with countries such as France.

She added that getting countries to accept their citizens is a ‘major issue’, even with a returns deal, particularly when a migrant has destroyed their passport and their country will not issue a new one.

THIRD COUNTRIES

Under a Reform government, the Foreign Office would also ‘rapidly negotiate’ agreements with so-called third countries to accept migrants who cannot be sent home.

It will look to revive the Tory-era agreement to send small-boat migrants to Rwanda on a one-way ticket, which was thwarted by the courts, and seal an agreement with Albania, which already has a successful returns deal for its citizens with the UK but has said it is not interested in taking others.

Reform also said it will use British Overseas Territories as a ‘strategic fallback’, singling out Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, whose ‘isolated airfield’ can accommodate Airbus’s A330 aircraft but, with a population of just 900, would need accommodation building and has no major hospital.

When a similar an idea was mooted by then home secretary Suella Braverman in 2023, it was revealed that ministers were told it would cost in the region of £1 million for each migrant sent to the island, such is the required investment in infrastructure.

Although it could be costly and time-consuming to agree deals with third countries, it might be possible, particularly if a Reform government was no longer bound by adverse court rulings.

Rwanda is now taking migrants from the US in a deal with Donald Trump, in what will also be seen as a boost to Reform.

RAIDS ON MIGRANTS

A group of people, believed to be migrants, are pictured on a small boat near Gravelines, northern France

An aerial photograph shows inflatable dinghies believed to have been used by migrants to cross the Channel and stored in a Port Authority yard in Dover

Another proposal based on President Trump’s approach would be ‘large-scale raids’ to find illegal immigrants already living in Britain.

Immigration enforcement action already exists in the UK, with the Home Office recently arresting 280 people suspected of working illegally for food delivery firms – many of them living in asylum hotels.

However, Reform wants to ‘identify and detain all illegal migrants in the UK’ through an Illegal Migrant Identification Centre within its new UK Deportation Command.

It would involve far greater co-operation and automatic data-sharing between the authorities including the NHS, HMRC and DVLA to find people who have no right to live in the UK.

Reform’s policy document said it would introduce mandatory ‘biometric capture’ such as fingerprints being taken in all police encounters and said in the past many people had slipped through the net because warrants ‘covered only a single property’.

Increased raids would likely lead to angry protests on the streets, as has happened in the US.

A decade ago, Home Office vans had their tyres slashed and paintwork scratched in east London while officials were pelted with eggs as they tried to round up suspected illegal immigrants working in a shop.

VOLUNTARY RETURNS 

In addition to introducing far tougher enforcement, Reform would also encourage illegal immigrants to leave the UK of their own accord.

It said it will allow a six-month assisted voluntary return window before large-scale raids begin and offer people a ‘financial incentive to self-deport’.

Migrants would be given £2,500 as well as a free flight home, with a smartphone app developed to make it easy to sign up.

The Home Office already provides money to migrants and facilitates returns, with almost 12,000 taking place in 2024, but Reform wants as many people as possible to leave voluntarily as it is cheaper than detention and deportation.

LEGAL REFORMS 

Women, children and men in orange life jackets attempting to climb onto a small rubber boat in France yesterday 

Some of the group were seen bobbing in the water  

Another area where Reform wants to go further than the Labour Government or the Tories is by pulling out of international treaties in order to avoid its policies being overturned in the courts.

It says it will disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention ‘which could be used by activist judges to frustrate deportations’.

A Reform government would also repeal Labour’s Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, which has been blamed for allowing many illegal migrants and foreign criminals to remain in the UK by telling judges their right to a family life would be breached by deportation.

The plans would undoubtedly face challenges in the House of Lords, but former government lawyer Sir Jonathan Jones KC told the Financial Times: ‘A government with the necessary backing in Parliament could repeal the Human Rights Act and other relevant domestic law.’

However, experts say that, even without human rights law, asylum seekers facing detention or deportation would still have legal redress in the UK.

Leading human rights barrister Shoaib M. Khan told the Daily Mail: ‘English common law provides fundamental protections including habeas corpus, allowing individuals to contest unlawful detention, and judicial review which can scrutinise decisions for illegality, procedural unfairness, or irrationality.’

He added that the entire scheme could even be halted if a judicial review (JR) in the High Court was successful.

‘For mass or systematic removal schemes, a policy-wide JR is generally more effective than challenging individual decisions, as it can halt multiple removals simultaneously and secure interim relief while the legality of the policy is examined.’