Reform UK has announced plans to detain illegal immigrants in areas that vote for the Green Party or areas with Green Party-run councils, if it wins the next general election.
Zia Yusuf, Reform’s spokesman for Home Affairs, announced the policy ‘Vote Green, Get Illegals’ in response to what he says is Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s desire for Britain to have “no borders at all”.
Mr Yusuf said that in order to deport all illegal migrants in Britain, Reform UK would need to develop capacity to detain “tens of thousands at a time”.
“Migrants will not be able to leave these detention centres, and each will be held there a couple of weeks before being deported,” Mr Yusuf said.
A Reform government will not put any migrant detention facilities in any constituency with a Reform MP, Mr Yusuf promised, adding that areas with a Reform-controlled council would also be exempt.
“Of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to locate the detention centres,” he said.
“Put simply, if you vote in a Reform council or Reform MP, we guarantee you won’t have a detention centre near you.
“If you vote Green, there’s a good chance you will,” the Reform spokesman said.
Reform said that the pledge comes as a result of the Green Party’s advocacy for “open borders,” and that the party looks forward to “their warm embrace of this policy”.
The Green Party has repeatedly denied having an open borders policy, spokespeople for the party seeking to draw a distinction between the Greens’ “long-range vision” and more immediate policy plans.
In an interview in December, Green Party leader Zack Polanski told Sky News that open borders would not be a “pragmatic” policy for a world in “turmoil”.
Asked in the same interview why his party was being attributed an open border policy, Mr Polanski said that open borders were part of a “long-range vision of what society could look like if there was a Green government and if we’d had a long time to fix some of the systemic problems”.
The announcement received pushback from politicians and commentators, with former Conservative MP Simon Clarke stating that “we need to stop illegal immigration, but this is abhorrent from Reform”.
The post was shared by Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch.
Reform UK has previously pledged to establish ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ if it is elected to government, an expansive effort to tackle illegal immigration that would include the creation of a new ‘Deportation Command’ and the construction of ‘secure immigration removal centres’ (SIRCs) to detain up to 24,000 illegal migrants at a time, ahead of deportation.
The party has committed to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights if it wins a general election, as well as repealing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a British Bill of Rights.
Reform has said that in government it would pass the Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill, which would “create a legal duty to remove illegal migrants for the Home Secretary”.
Immigration is primed to play a central role in Britain’s next general election, with ongoing population growth in the UK currently attributed largely to inward migration.