Reform UK is planning to build a surveillance tool that will use vast quantities of government held personal data for the “relentless” deportation of “all illegal migrants in the UK,” with campaigners warning that a new data law recently passed by Labour will enable the plans.
US surveillance tech giant Palantir, which has aided US President Donald Trump’s “paramilitary-style” immigration crackdown and is deeply intertwined with the British state, has said it would aid the agenda. The tech giant’s UK head, Louis Mosley, told the Observer last month that if Reform forms a government and has a “clear public mandate” to do so, Palantir would allow them to access NHS data for immigration enforcement.
Two data privacy experts described Reform’s plan as “chilling.” “The public should rightly worry about how fast their private information could be hoarded and shared for potentially chilling purposes,” said Silkie Carlo, director of data privacy campaign organisation Big Brother Watch. Duncan McCann, technology and data lead at the Good Law Project, called Reform’s plan: “a chilling step along the road toward a surveillance state.”
UK Deportation Command
Reform’s mass deportation project, “Operation Restoring Justice,” which Farage first announced in a press conference hosted by the Telegraph last August, includes detention centres designed to detain 24,000 migrants, five deportation flights per day, 288,000 deportations a year, and a new immigration enforcement agency to enforce the crackdown.
The operation will be powered by powerful immigration surveillance tech and fed with data mined from across UK government, healthcare, financial, and police databases in plans that resemble the model of the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown, which uses a Panopticon-like surveillance software to locate, detain, and deport people on a grand scale.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and their spokesperson for Home Affairs, Zia Yusuf with a copy of the party’s deportation policy. Photo: Carl Court / Getty
In a speech in February, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, announced that if Reform wins the next general election they will set up “UK Deportation Command,” an immigration enforcement agency that will be the driving force of an “emergency programme” to “track down, detain and deport all illegal migrants.”
In a Reform policy document released last August, the party said that UK Deportation Command would feature an “Illegal Migrant Identification Centre” which would run on a “cutting-edge enforcement data centre” that will “automatically share data” between various state and non-state groups and “include mandatory biometric capture during any police encounter.”
Screengrab from Reform UK’s ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ document, published August 2025
Reform boasts that its enforcement data centre proposal would address loopholes that allow “illegal” migrants to evade detection, such as “banks and GP surgeries [being] unaware of a customer’s [immigration] status.”
“If Reform wins the next general election... Britain’s maritime borders will be among the most surveilled borders in the world,” Yusuf, a former tech CEO who has declared his admiration for Elon Musk, promised earlier this month at the TechUK conference in London.
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Centralising this data into a single tool for ‘relentless’ deportations would import an American model that strips away our fundamental rights
Duncan McCann, Good Law Project
“Centralising this data into a single tool for ‘relentless’ deportations would import an American model that strips away our fundamental rights,” says McCann. In the US, ICE surveillance runs on personal data. As reported by WIRED, Forbes, and 404 Media, ICE’s current capabilities are powered by some of the most sensitive data in the world - including information amassed from across U.S. government departments responsible for healthcare, immigration status, social services, finance, voting, and citizenship records.
Palantir and NHS Data
In the US, surveillance tech firm Palantir provides ICE with data analysis and AI tools and last year sold ICE two powerful new tools – ImmigrationOS and ELITE, developed specifically for surveilling and tracking immigrants. Could Palantir also enable Reform’s proposed UK Deportation Command?
As previously reported in the Nerve, Palantir already has at least £670m in past and current contracts to process NHS, police, military, and financial regulation data. In an interview with the Observer last month, the head of Palantir UK, Louis Mosley, indicated that NHS data could be used for immigration enforcement. Mosley said that if Reform won with a “clear public mandate” for it, the company would execute plans for Reform to use NHS records.
“Our belief in the importance of abiding by the democratic decision is going to take us into delivering some very controversial things,” Mosley said.
Campaigners have long been sounding the alarm that the firm’s unparalleled access to data on 65 million people, particularly detailed NHS health records, leaves the UK wide open to “data-driven state abuses of power.”
Palantir told the Nerve that its NHS software is “helping to deliver better patient care,” and that “how that software is used is controlled by the NHS Trusts who use it, with data – legally and contractually – only able to be processed strictly in accordance with their instructions.”
Labour Clears the Path
Data privacy experts have further warned that a new data law passed by the Labour government, the Data (Use and Access) Act, has paved the way for a Reform data-driven immigration crackdown, by weakening protections.
“Labour have paved the way for this massive data grab by giving Ministers powers to change the law according to their whims,” says Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer at the data privacy campaign Open Rights Group. Delli Santi described the new legislation as “a loaded gun” for Reform, leaving “nothing in the law” to prevent them seizing more data.
The act, which came into effect earlier this year, empowers ministers to use so-called ‘Henry VIII powers’ – provisions allowing ministers to change the law by statutory instrument without a full parliamentary vote – to legally access huge stores of government-held data with minimal parliamentary scrutiny.
Reform UK’s own document announcing UK Deportation Command was published less than two months after Labour passed its new data bill, and acknowledges that Reform will collect data for the enforcement data centre “using powers granted by the new legislation.”
“The Labour Government's gutting of UK data law was an outrageous power grab,” Carlo of Big Brother Watch told the Nerve, “that does indeed arm Starmer and future governments with eye-watering powers that could enable a surveillance state with very little parliamentary oversight.”
In response to questions from the Nerve, a Labour spokesperson called these allegations a “false claim.” “While it has streamlined...data sharing, the same legal checks remain in place - organisations must still demonstrate a lawful basis for using [data]... Any changes to these rules would require new legislation, which Parliament would need to debate and approve.”
Labour’s statement appears to contradict guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), however, which states that organisations “don’t need to decide if sharing the information is actually necessary for [the public authority making a request for data] to perform their public task or function.” It also overlooks that Parliament has not opposed a statutory instrument since the 1970s.
According to delli Santi, “Labour needs to roll back on the UK data protection reform, and restore protections against government misuse and reuse of personal data of British residents,” he says. “As the experience in the US shows, data protection is the first line of defense against authoritarianism in the digital age.”