Like many Americans abroad, Kaelynn Narita has watched on in horror in recent months as immigration enforcement agents (ICE) brutally carry out Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. A research manager with limited leave to remain in the UK, Ms Narita fears what could 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 over the past nine years and Reform’s pledge to scrap indefinite leave to remain (ILR) – permanent settled status in the UK – threatens to throw her future into jeopardy.
Ms Narita is currently on a graduate visa and working as a research manager at citizens’ rights campaign group the3million, building on the work of her politics PhD. She had been due to get permanent settled status in the UK this September under the 10-year long residence route to settlement, but Labour has pledged to scrap the pathway.
She now faces an even longer wait to permanent residency under home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s reforms and is worried that, even if she finally gets settlement in five years’ time, it could be snatched away by a Reform government.
Reform’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf set out a swathe of new proposals to tackle immigration on Monday. The plans included mass deportations and replacing ILR with a work visa that has to be renewed every five years.
Mr Yusuf said it is “not true” that the party’s plans for a UK Deportation Command will face the same issues as US president Mr Trump’s body, which saw an immigration crackdown in Minnesota lead to mass detentions, protests and two deaths.
But he said the unit would “track down, detain and deport” people in the country illegally, aiming for up to 288,000 people each year.
Mr Yusuf said the deportation agency would have the capacity to detain 24,000 migrants at a time.
At the end of March 2025, there were 1,806 people being held in immigration detention or in prisons under immigration powers. Under Reform’s proposals, ILR would be scrapped and replaced with a work visa at a high salary threshold, meaning tens of thousands of foreign nationals already in the UK could lose their right to live here.
Ms Narita, 27, who is from San Francisco, explained: “I’ve lived in the UK for nearly 10 years, originally coming here on a student visa in 2016. My whole journey to settlement has been turmoil because of Labour.
“I was due to complete the 10-year settlement route in September this year, but now that is all pending based on the government’s consultation, so I have to figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m going to have to switch visas, and my graduate route visa is due to expire in 2028.
“Now with Reform making this announcement, even if I do get indefinite leave to remain, I don’t know if I would be able to stay anyway.”
Speaking about the ICE detentions in the US, she added: “The idea of emulating that in the UK means that people will feel the same sense of fear of leaving their homes, attending schools, and fear of these violent attacks.
“It creates a drag net, where innocent people are caught up. People in the UK will be facing that kind of anxiety.”
Referring to Mr Yusuf’s announcement to replace ILR with five-year work visas, Ms Narita added: “There are so many questions. What if, as a woman I wanted to have children, what is my future if I can’t work? There are just so many things that they are not considering that would mean that I couldn’t have a future in the UK.
“How can I build a route to stay here if I am always having to get more visas, it’s adding extra burdens.”
Ms Narita, who studied for her undergraduate degree and then PhD at Goldsmiths University, London, added: “When I came to the UK, I didn’t have this intention to settle, but life happens and this is where I’ve ended up. I’ve now lived here my whole adult life and I don’t know what I would do if I had to move back to America.
“My whole life is here, I live with my partner, we have our cat. It’s very difficult to think about leaving. If I had got ILR this year, I could have applied for British citizenship and now I don’t have that path. So it feels like it’s all stacked on top of each other as punishment.”
Andreea Dumitrache, from the3million, added: “Stripping people of their rights after they’ve built lives, families and futures in the UK is fundamentally unfair.”
Dr Dora-Olivia Vicol, CEO of the Work Rights Centre, criticised Reform for wanting to emulate the US ICE deportations, saying the plans were a waste of money and would see families and communities torn apart.
She said that plans to retrospectively strip people of their settled status in the UK would be "callous" and would "actively hurt our economy and public services".
Minnie Rahman, CEO of human rights charity Praxis, said: “Reform UK is offering a future where people’s rights are stripped away to push racist, xenophobic policies that spread hate and division. These plans won’t just target migrants – they will damage our democracy, crash the economy, and make the UK a more hostile place for all people of colour, regardless of immigration status."
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