A terrifying prospect: Reform pledge to create ICE-style agency

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Reform has gone full Trump

ICE agents carrying out an enforcement operation

While scenes from America of ICE agents shooting U.S. citizens would’ve shocked most ordinary people, Reform have pledged to create a similar ICE-style agency in the UK.

The party’s spokesperson for Home Affairs, Zia Yusuf, has said that Reform will create a UK Deportation Command’, which would have capacity to detain up to 24,000 migrants at any time and will run five deportation flights a day if Reform wins power, the party will announce.

Reform have also said that they will end the indefinite leave to remain (ILR) status, should it come to power. The Labour Party has condemned the plans saying that they are divisive and show that Reform was planning “to deport people who have followed the rules, worked hard and built their lives here – our friends, neighbours and colleagues”. 

The Labour party’s chair, Anna Turley, said the policies were “a direct attack on settled families and fundamentally un-British”. She added: “Britain is a proud, tolerant and diverse nation, which stands in opposition to the kind of divisive politics stoked by Reform.”

Yusuf has said that the ICE-style deportation agency will deport up to 288,000 annually on five flights a day. 

Shocking images of violence and killings carried out by ICE officers in the U.S. have made headlines in recent weeks.

In one of the most recent incidents, federal agents shot and killed an intensive care unit nurse who had joined protests against an immigration crackdown.

Alex Pretti, a US citizen who lived in Minneapolis and worked as a nurse, became the second person to be fatally shot in the city during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown this month.

Pretti is understood to have joined protests after Renee Good, also 37, was shot dead by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in her car earlier this month.

Bystander videos showed Mr Pretti with a phone in his hand, and his family insist he was not holding a gun when shot.

Despite most people being shocked at the violence, Reform it seems are keen to replicate an ICE-style agency in the UK.

Basit Mahmood is the editor of Left Foot Forward

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