Article by Emiliano Mellino repulished from TBIJ under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

In brief

• The Home Office’s immigration team is carrying out more “enforcement visits” than ever, at an average of 60 a day
• Yet only around a third of these operations, including raids on homes and businesses, resulted in an arrest
• Warrants were only used in a quarter of raids, down from 40% a decade ago. Experts say this suggests they are fishing expeditions based on weak intelligence

Customers were sitting down for dinner at Sultanz, an Indian restaurant in a quiet town by the Cornish coast, one Friday last month when two unmarked vans pulled up outside and around 20 immigration officers emerged.

The town has seen barely any raids but Samsu Ali, the restaurant’s owner, says it felt like his business was being “invaded” that evening. He says: “As soon as they park … everyone runs to the kitchen, front door, back door, everywhere.”

The officers, from the Home Office’s ICE (immigration, compliance and enforcement) team, had no warrant and entered the premises without explaining the terms of access, says Samsu. Once they were in, they asked every worker for their details, to be checked against a government database. Everyone’s records checked out apart from one: 40-year-old Nanu Mia, who had been packing meals for collection.

Samsu Ali (right), the owner of Sultanz in Camborne, Cornwall and Nanu Mia (left), who was packing meals when ICE arrived in October. Photo: Maisie Marshall

Remembering the incident, Nanu says he asked, in broken English, for a translator. Instead, he was offered Google Translate. He gestured with his hands, offering to write down his name, but was ignored.

Suddenly, he was grabbed, cuffed and marched into a waiting van. Nanu suffers from asthma and when the panic set in, he struggled to breathe. He was in shock, unsure what was happening.

Samsu knew there had been a mistake: Nanu is allowed to work in the UK as a dependant of his wife, a care worker. So he called Nanu’s sister, who rushed to the restaurant with his ID card.

This time, when the officers ran his name through the system, his details came up. Nanu was released. But without Samsu’s last-minute intervention, things could have gone differently. In the weeks since, Nanu has developed a habit of looking out the window, worried the officers might return.

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Raids like this are increasingly common in our high streets. The Home Office has said they are necessary to “restore order” to the immigration system. It posts videos showing migrants being detained, invites journalists on ride-alongs and boasts of arresting people in record numbers.

At the start of the year, home secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government had “surged enforcement activity to the highest level in British history” ensuring “illegal migrants … have nowhere to hide”.

However, we can reveal that the majority of people bearing the brunt of this crackdown have not breached any immigration laws – in fact, two-thirds of so-called “enforcement visits” resulted in no arrests last year. What’s more, they are increasingly being carried out without warrants, which are now used in just a quarter of raids compared to more than 40% a decade ago.

Experts say this points to the Home Office carrying out “fishing expeditions” based on weak intelligence and hearsay. The upshot is wasted resources, disrupted businesses and traumatised individuals.

“Thousands upon thousands of lives are impacted,” says Concepta Cassar, head of policy at Migrant Rights Network. She said she knows of businesses that have been targeted every few months even though nobody has been found to be doing anything wrong.

The government’s objective isn’t simply to detain people, says Cassar, but to show it has control over an “invented political problem” that scapegoats migrants for societal issues it has failed to address.

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Mothin Ali, deputy leader of the Green party, said our findings were “alarming” and called for the government to “end these unjustified raids and protect people’s rights.”

“People are being humiliated and whole communities terrorised …This is racist harassment dressed up as immigration enforcement,” he says.

“The falling use of warrants is deeply concerning and raises serious questions about the legality of these operations. Businesses may be intimidated into letting officers in without realising they can refuse. Britain must not import Trump’s ICE playbook.”

60 raids every day

Between 2023 and 2025 the number of immigration “enforcement visits” rose by about 40%, to more than 23,500. That’s in excess of 60 per day. The figures include raids on workplaces and homes, as well spot checks in public places: streets, train stations, ports.

Of the 23,500 carried out last year, more than 15,500 (66%) resulted in no arrests.

In response to our investigation, the Home Office insisted that enforcement visits were “based on robust intelligence and risk assessments, compliant with policy”.

While immigration raids are expected to continue to increase, operations by the UK’s ICE teams have received much less scrutiny than their US counterparts.

To better understand how these operations are conducted and the impact they have on communities, we spoke to workers and businesses, filed freedom of information requests to the Home Office, and presented our findings to experts including a former immigration officer.

Kevin Barker left the Home Office in 2015 after telling senior staff that the department’s officers were often entering people’s premises illegally. He now helps businesses overturn fines for allegedly employing people who do not have the right to work in the UK. He doesn’t condone people breaching this immigration law but he says the fines are often issued unfairly.

Officers don’t have formal targets, he explains, but they are encouraged to clock up as many raids as possible and the evidence to justify them doesn’t need to be strong. As a result, many are based on tenuous tip-offs – a fact Barker says is reflected in the declining use of warrants.

“You’re not allowed to apply for a search warrant if the intelligence you’ve got is old or an anonymous allegation that can’t be corroborated … but it doesn’t stop them from doing the visit,” he said.

By the government’s own admission, this is a bad use of resources. A 2016 report from the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI) highlighted that about two-thirds of allegations in the Home Office’s management system had come from members of the public. It cited an earlier review stating that this was “not the most efficient way for [immigration enforcement] to direct its activity”.

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It’s not hard to see why. As Barker explains, anyone can send an anonymous tip-off – a disgruntled worker or a business competitor. Or just a member of the public who assumes a worker is illegal because of their poor English: “They think they’re doing the right thing, but actually they’re being a bit prejudicial.”

Recent data we obtained, though, suggests this has only worsened. Last year, 89% of leads on “immigration crime” came from the public or from the Crimestoppers, a charity that collects anonymous tip-offs. Around 2% came from the police.

The consequences for businesses can be devastating, as Sultanz’s owners have discovered.

The restaurant was lauded in the local press during the pandemic for giving free food to hospitals and homeless shelters. But since the raid last month, it has seen a stark drop-off in customers, Samsu said.

Samsu Ali, owner of Sultanz in Camborne, which has faced racist abuse following an immigration raid. Photo: Maisie Marshall

In a local Facebook group, a question about the incident at the restaurant prompted a number of racist and threatening comments. One person wrote: “People with somewhat darker skin are literally taking over our community and causing a lot of unrest.”

“Fucking migrants and illegals…All over Camborne and Redruth,” posted another person.

Someone even wrote: “Attack before we’re attacked” followed by “make them unwelcome”.

Nobody clarified that all of Sultanz’s staff had the legal right to work in the UK.

The comments left Samsu struggling to sleep for days. “They don’t understand how much money I spent on this business,” he says. “How much time I have spent in the last six years. How much hard work I did.”

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‘An element of coercion’

If officers don’t have enough to secure a warrant, they can rely on other powers to enter the premises. If it’s a licensed shop or restaurant, they can use licensing powers. Or, in most cases – more than 12,000 last year – they can ask for the consent of the tenant, manager or owner.

When using this power, officers are meant to inform the person of their rights, including the fact that they are free to revoke their consent at any time. But this doesn’t always happen. It didn’t at Sultanz. And as recently as 2024, government inspectors criticised immigration officers for entering premises without consent.

“There’s an element of coercion here,” says Cassar of the Migrant Rights Network. She says people allow officers to enter their homes or businesses because they do not fully know their rights, that they can ask further questions or that they can question the power under which these raids are being done. In other cases, they might worry that their business could face even greater disruption if they resist.

“So they’re left in that situation of powerlessness and of fear. And who protects you? Where do you report to? Because these people are the law.”

In one instance after a business refused to consent to a search, officers found another way to get in. On 5 August this year officers arrived with no warrant to South Motorcycles, a garage in London. Staff refused to let them in, but officers went away, made a phone call and came back with an “assistant director” letter that granted them the power to enter.

These letters are meant to be reserved for urgent cases where officers do not have time to apply for a warrant. They need to have a strong reason to believe that a specific person who is in breach of certain immigration laws is inside.

But paperwork we’ve seen suggests the South Motorcycles operation was another fishing expedition. A section of a form handed to the business, which was then crossed out, said they were looking for “no named offenders”.

Officers did detain two customers who were at the garage and then released them on bail, but did not find anyone working there in breach of immigration law.

People don’t realise that we have ICE… it’s here

Concepta Cassar, head of policy at Migrant Rights Network

Barker told us that, in the case of South Motorcycles, officers had likely entered unlawfully.

There is a long history of officers misusing this power. In 2014, the ICIBI found officers had used these letters unlawfully to bypass the need for a warrant. Their use was justified in less than a third of cases examined.

“You’re used to walking into premises and saying… ‘Let us in’. And then all of a sudden somebody challenges you,” Barker said. “Then you’re like, ‘Right, I’ll show you. Let me get my [assistant director] on the phone.’”

‘ICE is here’

While most people might not know what their rights are when ICE officers turn up at their door, anti-raids groups in many cities across the UK are trying to change that, said Griff Ferris, a spokesperson for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

These groups will often hold workshops or provide information to residents about their rights. They can also go further by filming raids, questioning officers or trying to stop arrests.

“Every day people are resisting raids in their communities,” Ferris said.

In recent years residents in London and Glasgow have stopped immigration raids by blocking vans in which people had been detained for several hours. On one occasion protesters blocked a coach that was intended to carry asylum seekers to the controversial Bibby Stockholm barge, where conditions were so poor one resident died by suicide.

Protesters sit along the road in south London over the planned transfer of asylum seekers to the Bibby Stockholm barge in DorsetThabo Jaiyesimi / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty

Several councils have said they will refuse to hand over data to the Home Office if it will be used for immigration enforcement, and pledged to support residents or businesses affected by raids.

Meanwhile, both the Conservatives and Reform have floated policies that they say will increase the number of arrests and deportations.

Reform’s include paying people who make anonymous tips-offs that result in companies getting fined. The Conservatives want to adopt some of the methods used by ICE in the US, where agents have been accused of warrantless arrests, kidnapping and unlawful killings.

In a debate earlier this year, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson Max Wilkinson asked Labour’s Mahmood to condemn ICE and to rule out “ICE squads in the streets of Britain”.

Mahmood dodged the question, saying the UK government had managed to deport record numbers of people without arming officers, as is the case in the US.

But Cassar said there are already stark parallels: much like its counterpart, the UK’s ICE targets minority and migrant communities with little accountability.

“They’re not a militarised force yet but we have the same need for community defence and the need to look out for each other,” she said .“People don’t realise that we have ICE. They’re like ‘ICE is coming to the UK’. No, it’s here.”

If you have faced or witnessed an immigration enforcement operation you think was handled unfairly or unlawfully, please get in touch with our reporter emilianomellino@tbij.com

This story was updated on Tuesday 10 November 2026 to include a response from the Home Office.

Reporter: Emiliano Mellino
Bureau Local editor: Gareth Davies
Editor: Franz Wild
Production editor: Alex Hess
Fact checker: Lydia Morrish

TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.

Article by Emiliano Mellino repulished from TBIJ under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.