Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of refugees who have already been granted protection in the UK, as part of a severe crackdown on migration to Britain. The party announced on Monday that, if it came to power at the next general election, it would review all successful asylum claims from the past five years. The speech was given on the same date that, 58 years ago, then defence secretary Enoch Powell delivered his infamous and highly divisive “rivers of blood” speech in which he criticised rates of migration from Commonwealth countries. Reform’s review would determine whether the people granted refugee status had entered Britain illegally or overstayed their visas and whether their country of origin was now deemed to be safe. If they met one of these criteria, they would have their protection in the UK rescinded. The party said that about 400,000 people would be “in scope” of the review and that the majority would be deported by the party’s new agency called the UK Deportation Command. Farage said that “the public’s faith in the whole democratic system has broken down” because asylum seekers continued to arrive in Britain on small boats. He added that Reform would establish “the principle that anyone who comes to the country illegally will not be able to stay”. Reform claimed, without providing a breakdown of its figures, that its policy of reversing asylum grants would save taxpayers £11.9bn over the next parliament, from 2029-34.

Farage also said that ethnic minority Reform candidates were receiving “utterly appalling” abuse on X, adding that the social media platform “is now becoming a very unpleasant and very dangerous place”. In response, tech billionaire Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform and has become increasingly critical of Farage, accused the Reform UK leader of being “the definition of controlled opposition” — a purported opposition party used by the ruling party as a tool to trick constituents and hold on to power. Farage declined to provide details on the extra cost of creating new detention places for the refugees whose protection would be rescinded or about how many new staff would be required to review previously approved applications, saying details would be released closer to the next election. “We do expect most people to voluntarily accept that they are here illegally and they will have to go,” he said. The party has already pledged to introduce Operation Restoring Justice to “track down, identify and deport all illegal migrants in the UK”. The effort would be led by a new removals agency with the capacity to hold 24,000 migrants in detention at any one time.

Reform has said it would spend £10bn over five years to increase capacity to detain and fly out 24,000 migrants each month and that it would be able to deport up to 600,000 people. This approach was intended to support the party’s objective of achieving net emigration, meaning more people leave the country than arrive, which has not been the case since 1993. Reform’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf said last year that his immigration plans would be like Trump 2.0, referring to US President Donald Trump’s second term in office. He also said he had held discussions with figures around Trump who helped frame his border plans.  The party has more recently, however, sought to distance its policies for a UK Deportation Command from the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which has been involved in high-profile shootings and killings over the past year, saying the UK did not have the same problems with guns and policing. Farage said on Monday that the focus on ICE and Trump served to “raise the temperature of everything”, and Reform had, in fact, learnt a lot from former Democratic president Barack Obama’s immigration policy.