Foreign National Offenders (FNOs): a broad term encompassing individuals who are not British citizens and have been convicted of a criminal offence in the UK.

Criminalisation: the process by which individuals, acts or behaviours are treated as ‘criminal’, specifically through legislation

Scapegoating ‘foreign national offenders (FNOs)’ has become a focus point of immigration legislation and narratives. This has led to an announcement that the Home Office will publish FNO nationalities for the first time. While this is a blatant attempt to manufacture a link between nationalities and criminality only serves to deepen prejudice and discrimination towards migrants from certain countries, it speaks to a wider issue within the immigration system.

Since coming into power, the Government has repeated their commitment to increasing deportations, with record numbers of people being removed against their will regularly reported. The main target of this has been people whose asylum claims have been rejected, but there are other groups who make up a significant portion of these people in reporting. These include people who aren’t British citizens and have received a criminal sentence of 12 months or more*. 

The Government refers to them as ‘FNOs’, while they are often referred to in the media as ‘foreign criminals.’ These labels dehumanise people included in this category. ‘FNO’ policies have also often acted as a form of de facto citizenship deprivation for some Black diasporic communities, as a result of racist policing and hostile immigration policies that have pushed people into dispossession and deportation. Let’s get into what this means.

Becoming an FNO

Firstly, what does it mean to be labelled an FNO? The Home Secretary has a duty to deport people who are categorised as “foreign national offenders.” Most of these people are deported, besides a small number who cannot be deported for human rights reasons, for example.

While there is a statutory obligation to deport someone who isn’t a British citizen where they receive a prison sentence of 12 months or more, people with sentences shorter than this often get deported too. This is because the Home Secretary can judge deporting someone to be “conducive to the public good”. 

People also usually don’t serve their full sentence in prison in the UK: prisoner transfer agreements, the Early Removal Scheme, the Tariff-Expired Removal Scheme and the Facilitated Returns Scheme (FRS) all enable people to leave the UK earlier. The FRS also includes a resettlement grant of around £1,500 for people labelled as FNOs and in some cases their family members (It can be less depending on whether someone applied during their prison sentence, if their conviction wasn’t in the UK, or if they have a non-custodial sentence. There are also £500 uplifts available for people deemed vulnerable). People who have a conviction that does not involve a prison sentence can also apply for the FRS.

Criminalised, not criminal

Criminalisation is a social and legal construct. This means that it is something that is created, not a natural, timeless fact. This is why we don’t uncritically label people as ‘criminal’, particularly in the context of increasingly punitive anti-migrant legislation. Laws like the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and ‘Illegal’ Migration Act 2023, as well as the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill currently passing through Parliament, have sought to criminalise increasing aspects of migrants’ journeys and existences. This saw the introduction of offences for people smuggling that are applied to people coerced into steering small boats across the Channel, as well as so-called ‘illegal arrival’.

This is also a relatively new process: the targeting of non-UK nationals with deportation via criminal convictions began just over a decade ago. In 2012, Operation Nexus began as a joint Home Office and police initiative to build criminal cases against non-citizens without any criminal convictions, but whose deportation was deemed to be ‘conducive to the public good’- a vague concept that we have written about before.  The ‘public good’ provisions reinforce racism, including Islamophobia, through the narratives of deservingness that it is based on and the arbitrary manner in which it is applied.

This expanded with the acceleration of the Hostile Environment, which forced people without immigration status into criminalised work. By criminalised work we mean working without the required documentation (called ‘illegal working’ by the Government), as well as people who have been forced into certain areas of work as a means of survival because of this loss in status, and the use of ‘right to work’ checks preventing them from gaining employment in non-criminalised work.

For more on criminalisation, see our Words Matter blog on intermediaries.

Eastern European nationals, in particular Albanians and Romanians, have been specifically targeted by immigration controls, including through raids, being denied entry to the UK at the border, and by FNO policies. In the year ending March 2024, more people holding these two nationalities alone than the nationalities of all other people deported as ‘foreign national offenders’ put together. While Albanian and Romanian nationals have both been deported at higher rates since 2010, there is a marked difference in recent years: Between 2010 and 2024, they formed a combined 29% of people deported as FNOs, with this rising to 59% between 2023 and 2024.

Deportation as citizenship deprivation

It’s also important to note that while much media coverage of people who are deported as ‘FNOs’ dehumanises the people affected as the ‘wrong’ kind of migrant, many people affected have been born or spent the majority of their lives in the UK. In countries like Jamaica, this applies to larger proportions of those deported as FNOs, as well as for other reasons. These people have been raised in the UK, often having little to no connection to the country of their nationality and parents’ origin. A Government-commissioned report found that deporting these people raises ‘real ethical issues’, and proposed instead that blanket deportation based on sentence length should be stopped and ‘low-risk offenders’ excluded. 

In a debate in 2024, former MP Kenny MacAskill pointed to the specific impact on Jamaican nationals from South London and Somali nationals from Glasgow. He spoke about people who had grown up in the UK from a young age but, because they didn’t have citizenship, would be liable to be deported to a country where they have no family and where they hadn’t been since a child, instead of being rehabilitated in the UK. 

You may have heard a lot of noise in the media about people who’ve managed to stay in the UK because of appeals based on human rights, including family connections. But while guidance suggests that people who have strong personal, community and familial connections in the UK could be spared deportation (depending on sentence length) in accordance with Article 8 of the ECHR, in reality only 11% of appeals against deportation have been successful on human rights grounds.

Why is this relevant now and why should you care?

A lot of media noise has been generated lately, both as part of the Government’s bragging about deportation numbers, including FNOs, as well as most recently where there has been a focus on nationality-based “league tables” for non-citizens with criminal convictions. These narratives dehumanise people, portraying them as ‘bad migrants’, in order to show their deportation as good for society.

Instead, what FNO policy and the current push for deportations represent are an approach to migrants and migratised people that prioritises harm and dispossession. In this light, FNO policy together with the Hostile Environment and the introduction of ever-increasing numbers of immigration offences functions as a form of entrapment, where people’s very existence is made to be criminalised and the state seeks to deport them. The Government is incentivised to create increasingly punitive conditions for people who are criminalised, for example in making it easier to deport people with shorter prison sentences, because record numbers of deportations, particularly of ‘bad migrants’, makes it look like they are taking tough action against people who are ‘bad for’ or a ‘threat’ to the nation.

It is telling, therefore, that while deportation figures are not routinely published by the Home Office, deportations of people classed as ‘FNOs’ are.

Deportation, including of people with criminal records, treats people as disposable, disappearing them to another land with little care for their life or welfare there. It also forms a double standard of punishment for non-British nationals. As a result, migrants and migratised people who are deported are treated as unredeemable, and therefore disposable.

MRN stands against detention, deportation and criminalisation for all and will be exploring this as part of our Hostile Office campaign. Follow us on social media for updates.

* Additionally, people with sentences of less than 12 months can be deported if the Home Secretary deems it “conducive to the public good”

Check out our media coverage on foreign national offenders:

• Cooper ‘pandering’ to Farage by ordering publication of foreign criminals’ nationalities; The Guardian
• Labour’s planned foreign criminal ‘league tables’ branded ‘nothing more than dogwhistle politics’; Morning Star
• Only five convicted of piloting migrant boats this year; The Telegraph
• Bombshell chart shows where migrants clogging up UK prisons are from – most from Albania; The Daily Express

Further reading

•  Luke de Noronha, ‘Deporting Black Britons’ (2020)
• Outcry over plan to deport Jamaican nationals who came to UK as children | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian
• Jamaica deportation: Home Office flight leaves UK despite court ruling – BBC News
•  Britain deports people who grew up here. This racialised system must end | Zubaida Haque | The Guardian
•  Stephen Shaw, ‘Assessment of government progress in implementing the report on the welfare in detention of vulnerable persons’ (2018) Assessment of government progress in implementing the report on the welfare in detention of vulnerable persons: A follow-up report
• Deportation of foreign national offenders; House of Commons Library

In this section

• Publication of the nationalities of foreign national offenders