The British Conservative Party plans to create a new force to detain and deport people who entered the U.K. through irregular channels, modeling the agency on the U.S.’s immigration enforcement team ICE.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said Britain “must tackle the scourge of illegal immigration into Britain and secure our borders,” according to ITV. “That is why the Conservatives are setting out a serious and comprehensive new plan to end this crisis,” she said.
The “Removals Force” — a revamp of the existing immigration enforcement unit that sits within the U.K.’s interior ministry — would work closely with the police force to conduct regular immigration checks, according to the Tory party’s “border plan,” details of which are to be unveiled at the party conference on Sunday. The agency would see its annual budget jump to £1.6 billion a year.
With this plan, the Conservatives said they would aim to remove 750,000 irregular migrants from the U.K. in five years should they win the next election.
The announcements confirm the party’s hardened policy shift on topics like security and migration in a bid to win back some of the far-right Reform UK supporters, after having suffered a massive defeat in the last national elections. The Conservatives are polling third, well behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the ruling Labour Party.