Scotland faces Minnesota-style chaos as Nigel Farage plots mass deportations

Alongside the US Border Force, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has become Donald Trump’s main vehicle for the mass deportation of immigrants. But could it happen in Britain?

One high-profile victim was a five-year-old boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, whose arrest caused public outrage that was inflamed further when he was placed in a detention centre in Texas, instead of near his home in Minnesota.

READ MORE: Donald Trump's bullying of Hillary Clinton was a warning sign. Europe must stand up to him

Lawless brutality

This Gestapo-style operation has been difficult to watch and the president is losing the public debate. In Minnesota, shops and restaurants have closed, schools have emptied of pupils and teachers, and church attendances have been hit with people terrified to leave their homes for fear of the government.

Originally, deporting the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens” was supposed to be the focus of Trump’s campaign. No longer.

READ MORE: Think Donald Trump is bad now? He's about to get even worse

The lawless brutality we are witnessing is unusual but the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have been acting as co-conspirators in this war on US streets. In addition to sweeping up immigrants, Trump is threatening Democratic-controlled states with cuts in federal funding and the use of the Insurrection Act to allow the military to be deployed.

Commenting on the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, American historian Heather Cox Richardson said “it looked like an execution”. Out-of-control ICE agents appeared to behave like wild animals after a kill.

READ MORE: Reform's politics of despair will not fix Britain's crumbling foundations

Unintended consequences of voting for Reform UK

Some might argue that what happens in America, stays in America. But in our peculiar, and hopefully short-lived, political crisis in the UK, there remains the prospect of Reform UK, under Nigel Farage, forming the next government.

Farage has embraced many of Trump’s ideas and could mimic the tactics of ICE. This is a frightening prospect. In Britain, we are inclined to complacency and the idea that such events could never happen here. But they could. Voting simply to punish mainstream politicians may have unintended consequences.

We need to wake up to the prospect of an immigration-obsessed Trump sycophant waging a similar war against not just those in our country illegally but all migrants and foreigners.

READ MORE: Former Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman defects to Reform

Farage would rather they were not prominent in the public discourse, but forms of fascism, English nationalism, questions about who is really a citizen, and racist ideas about a ‘white Britain’ are never far away from the immigration debate. In the US, the current assault on foreigners speaks to sinister theories about the displacement of whites, with non-whites projected to become the majority in America by 2045.

Masked officers snatching people from streets?

If we’re not careful, ICE-style violence could be coming to a street near you, in Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle and London – places where there would be hostility towards Reform and which could suffer from the same kind of revenge tactics as those used by the Trump administration against Democrat-controlled cities in the US.

Reform UK plans to launch what it calls “Operation Restoring Justice”, with the creation of a new “UK Deportation Command”, seemingly based on ICE, and detention camps that would be used to arrest and deport at least, for now, 600,000 people.

But first the party would need to remove existing political, legal and constitutional safeguards, humiliating Britain in Europe and on the global stage by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. It could also scrap settled status and indefinite leave to remain, disapply the Refugee Convention and repeal UK human rights laws.

Will the Deportation Command officers charged with snatching people off the street bundle them into unmarked vehicles and treat them like criminals? Will they be equipped with guns, pepper spray, tear gas, masks, helmets and protective gear? Will children suffer the same fate as their parents? Will criticism be met by remarks like the head of ICE’s claim that “we have the best child-care facilities in America”?

Why Scotland needs migrants

Reform’s mass deportation plans would have a serious impact on Scotland. According to the 2022 census, more than half a million people living here were born outside the UK, with 75,400 people originally from Poland, 37,000 from India, and 29,000 from Pakistan. Nearly 397,000 people are non-British nationals. Does this mean that hundreds of thousands of people living peacefully and productively in Scotland are at risk?

And what about the 7 per cent of people from minority ethnic backgrounds? Are these people safe in Farage’s anti-immigrant obsessed hands?

The truth is that, partly as a result of Brexit, an enduring national curse masterminded by Farage, the UK needs more legal migrants, not less, with our population forecast to fall over the next few decades. Farage is betraying Britain’s interests.

In the year to mid-2024, 68,000 people moved out of Scotland but more than 124,000 arrived. Scotland needs more legal inward migration, not less if we are to overcome our rapidly declining birth rate.

A vote for Reform in the UK would be a step towards Trump’s world – a reminder of how important voting is and what could be at stake at the next election.

Scotland’s future as a successful nation depends to a significant degree on immigration. The mayhem that copying Trump would bring to our streets and the savagery that lurks behind Farage’s appalling remarks about migrants risk disaster.

Think it couldn’t happen here? Think again.

Henry McLeish is a former First Minister of Scotland and a visiting professor at the University of South Florida