I’ve been in Britain for my whole adult life, I don’t know what I would do under Reform’s immigration plans
Like many Americans abroad, Kaelynn Narita has watched in horror in recent months as immigration enforcement officials brutally pursued Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Ms Narita, a research manager with limited leave to remain in the UK, fears what might happen under Reform UK’s plans to oversee deportations as part of an ICE-style agency in Britain.
She has built a life in London for the past nine years, and Reform’s pledge to scrap indefinite leave to remain (ILR), permanent settled status in the UK, threatens to jeopardize her future.
Ms Narita is currently on a postgraduate visa and is working as a research manager at civil rights campaign group the3million following her PhD in politics. He was due to become permanently settled in the UK this September under the 10-year residence pathway to settlement, but Labor has vowed to cancel that pathway.
He now faces an even longer wait for permanent residence under home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s reforms and fears that even if he finally gets settled within five years it could be taken away from him by a Reform government.
Reform’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, presented a series of new proposals to tackle immigration on Monday. The plans included mass deportations and the replacement of indefinite leave to remain with a work visa that would have to be renewed every five years.
Mr Yusuf said it was “not true” that the party’s plans to set up a UK Deportation Command would face the same problems as the body of the US president, Mr Trump, in Minnesota, where a crackdown on immigrants has led to mass detentions, protests and two deaths.
But he said the unit would “track, detain and deport” people in the country illegally, targeting 288,000 people each year.
Mr Yusuf said the “Trump-inspired” deportation agency would have the capacity to detain 24,000 immigrants at a time.
At the end of March 2025, 1,806 people were being held in immigration detention or in prisons under immigration powers. Under Reform’s proposals, the ILR would be canceled and replaced by a work visa with a high salary threshold; This means tens of thousands of foreign nationals currently in the UK could lose their right to live here.
Ms Narita, 27, from San Francisco, explained: “I have lived in the UK for nearly 10 years and first came here on a student visa in 2016. My entire settlement journey has been tumultuous due to the Labor Party.
“I was supposed to get my 10-year residential route in September this year, but now this is all on hold based on government consultation, so I need to figure out what to do next. “I’ll need to change visas and my graduate route visa will expire in 2028.
“Now that Reform has made this announcement, even if I get permission to stay indefinitely, I still don’t know if I can stay.”
Speaking about ICE detentions in the US, he added: “The idea of emulating this in the UK means people will feel the same sense of fear as they leave their homes, go to schools and fear these violent attacks.
“It creates a dragnet in which innocent people are caught. People in the UK will face this kind of anxiety.”
Addressing Mr Yusuf’s announcement that he would replace the ILR with a five-year work visa, Ms Narita added: “There are so many questions. What if I want to have children as a woman, what happens to my future if I can’t work? There are so many things they haven’t taken into account that it would mean I wouldn’t have a future in the UK.”
“How can I create a route to stay here if I constantly have to get more visas, which puts extra burdens on me.”
Ms Narita, who studied for an undergraduate degree and then a PhD at Goldsmiths University in London, added: “When I came to the UK, I had no intention of settling down, but life happens and I’ve come to this point. I’ve lived here my whole adult life now and I don’t know what I would do if I had to return to America.”
“I’ve been here my whole life, I live with my partner, we have a cat. It’s hard to think about leaving. If I got ILR this year I could apply for British citizenship, but I don’t have that way at the moment. So it feels like everything is a punishment after another.”
3million’s Andreea Dumitrache added: “It is fundamentally unfair to take away people’s rights after they have built lives, families and futures in the UK.”
Labor Rights Center CEO Dr. Dora-Olivia Vicol criticized Reform for seeking to mimic ICE deportation processes in the US, saying the plans were a waste of money and would lead to the separation of families and communities.
He said plans to retroactively remove people from their settled status in the UK would be “callous” and would “actively harm our economy and public services”.
Minnie Rahman, chief executive of human rights charity Praxis, said: “Reform UK offers a future where people’s rights are stripped away to impose racist, xenophobic policies that spread hatred and division. These plans will not just target immigrants; they will damage our democracy, collapse the economy and make the UK a more hostile place for people of all ethnic backgrounds, regardless of immigration status.”
