A total of 19,779 foreign national criminals who have served time in prison for crimes live now free in the United Kingdom and have not been deported. This is a record high number, set by outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government, the Daily Mail reports.
That is despite the fact that in August 2025, the United Kingdom’s official website announced that foreign nationals who are convicted of crimes now face immediate deportation due to a change in the relevant legislation.
‘Foreign criminals will for the first time face immediate deportation after sentencing as the Government strengthens border security through the Plan for Change,’ the official government announcement declared.
The 19,779 current number is an increase of about 2,200 foreign criminals released since Labour came into power in July 2024. ‘The total number of foreign offenders living freely in Britain has rocketed by more than 400 per cent since 2012, when the number stood at less than 4,000,’ the Daily Mail points out in their piece.
The author also explains that foreign criminals are able to delay their deportations, despite the new August 2025 law, by submitting late asylum applications or by claiming to be the victim of alleged human trafficking.
According to the regulations, foreign criminals can only be held in immigration detention centres if they have a ‘realistic prospect of imminent removal’. With their asylum applications, even if they are eventually denied, criminal migrants can postpone their ‘imminent removal’, thus avoiding detention.
The article by the Daily Mail also points out that there has been an increase in overall deportations in the UK recently. In the first quarter of 2026, 5,858 migrants were deported, which is a 13-per-cent increase from last year. However, the number of deportations cannot keep up with the number of foreign criminals released from detention, due to the early release programme started by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in the fall of 2024.
Crimes committed by migrants and the level of deportations continue to be contentious topics in the United Kingdom, often sparking intense emotional reactions.
For instance, in March 2026, the story of a 24-year-old Nigerian migrant named Gift Oladele stirred outrage. He was convicted of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman in Wrexham, Wales, United Kingdom. Previously, he had already served two years in prison for falsely imprisoning another woman. However, he was not deported from the country after the judge in charge of his deportation case decided to ‘protect his right to a family life’.
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