‘Already returned over 24,000 people with no right to be here. And I won’t stop…’: British PM Starmer on illegal migrants in UK

The number of illegal migrants deported and those who voluntarily leave the UK is already on the rise. The recently introduced UK government’s White Paper on Immigration calls for significant changes to the country’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Keir Rodney Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in an X post writes -“I’ve already returned over 24,000 people with no right to be here. And I won’t stop there.”

The prime minister recently also remarked on legal migration, saying Britain “risked becoming an island of strangers” if immigration levels are not cut.

The UK Home Office has a system in place to deport foreigners who do not have a legal right to stay in the UK. The process to send people back to their home country is called Returns and is reported in 3 main groups –

Enforced Returns, where foreigners are deported by the Home Office,
Voluntary Returns, where foreigners leave on their own, and
Port Returns, where foreigners are refused entry to the UK.

Starmer took office on July 5, 2024, and since then, data shows that between 5 July 2024 and 22 March 2025, a total of 24,103 returns were recorded (including both enforced and voluntary returns). This is an 11% increase on the 21,807 returns in the same period 12 months prior.

Included in this total were 6,339 enforced returns of people with no legal right to remain in the UK. This compares with 5,244 enforced returns in the same period 12 months prior, an increase of 21%.

This means 17,764 left voluntarily, while 6,339 were forcibly deported, since Starmer’s first day in office as the PM.

The UK government’s White Paper on Immigration aims to prevent those seeking to come to the UK illegally, and those who aim to come to the UK lawfully but do not intend to observe the conditions of their visa, or to depart when it expires.

The White Paper also aims to bring down the rate of net migration in the UK. Levels of net migration in the UK were approximately 200,000 per year throughout most of the 2010s and have risen from 224,000 in the year to June 2019 to a record high of 906,000 in the year ending June 2023- a four-fold increase in the space of under four years.

The UK, like other European countries, is dealing with a rising illegal population. Increased legal net migration has led to an increase in illegal arrivals and stays in the UK, exacerbated by the country’s high asylum backlog and accommodation costs.

From 2018-2024, 220,000 people were found to have arrived via irregular means (150,000 having crossed the Channel in small boats), the vast majority of whom claimed asylum. This is in addition to people who claim asylum having arrived legally in the UK on visas intended for study, work, or visitor purposes, including 40,000 in 2024.