Immigration raids are at a record high – and businesses are pointing the finger at each other

The vans appeared six months ago. Office worker Kaz, 39, thought little of it at first. His desk overlooks Kentish Town Police station – blue and yellow checked vans are nothing out of the ordinary, but when he noticed officers confiscating e-bikes, he paid more attention. “And I realised: they were taking people too”. The penny dropped – they’re not police, they’re ICE.  

Otherwise known as Immigration, Compliance and Enforcement. The acronym may be closely associated with the American agency, but there’s a British ICE too, created in 2013 as part of the ‘hostile environment’. And today, there’s a record-breaking number of raids. In 2022, hundreds of local protestors in Peckham swamped immigration enforcement, stopping the arrest of their neighbour. Back then, London saw just over one immigration raid a day. This year, it’s ten.

While raids hit a low during the pandemic, the number had already been declining in the years since a 2016 peak. Now, though, renewed efforts are exceeding pre-pandemic levels. Nationally, the number of raids last year was double what it was in 2019. The Home Office has even been promoting its enforcement action via a dedicated TikTok account. The department had not responded to a request for comment on this story by the time of publication.

Between January and June of this year, 1,814 raids in London have resulted in 1,256 arrests. Kaz has witnessed four of them. Watching people being taken away in vans is “unsettling” and “dystopian”. Something you’d expect to see in America, or a country with a poor human rights record, “but not here”, he tells me.

But it is happening here, all over the city. Including in some of central London’s most iconic districts.

‘These guys are easy pickings’

Raids occur in the light of day. Officers slip into well-loved Soho haunts and leave with an employee in cuffs. They go relatively unnoticed. Club managers and restaurateurs on Frith Street shake their heads in disbelief when asked if they saw a rumoured incident at Soho stalwart Bar Italia. No one knows anything. “It’s sorted now,” is all the manager tells me.