Nigel Farage is importing Tom Homan’s family-separation machine to Britain.
On a stage in America, Farage stood beside Donald Trump’s immigration enforcer and said, “We’ve got terrible news for you. We’re hijacking Tom Homan and taking him back with us to secure our borders.”
It was a joke. It was a boast. It was a policy programme.
The joke is the genre.
Farage told his audience that Britain and Europe need a “more sensible view” of an administration the “traditional mainstream media” paints as “villainous.” He praised Homan’s deportations, his uncompromising style, his results. Reform UK has already promised mass deportations and the use of the Royal Navy to intercept small boats in the Channel.
Nothing in that pitch is ornamental. The “hijack” line is the whole reform manifesto.
Tom Homan did not merely advise ICE. He helped build the operation that made family separation a governing instrument. The Obama White House reportedly judged the policy too cruel to adopt before the first Trump administration made it a central feature of its immigration programme. In 2018, more than 5,500 children were separated from their parents under the border-wide zero-tolerance policy, and as many as 1,360 children remained separated in late 2024.
Under Trump’s current tenure, immigration officers have opened fire on at least 30 people, including two fatal shootings in July. The Trace’s running count identified Salgado Araujo and Durán Guerrero as the 29th and 30th people shot by immigration officers since Trump returned to office. Reform UK does not treat those facts as a warning. Farage is offering the man associated with that machinery as an import.
You are not asking for a tougher British border, Nigel. You are asking Britain to import American methods, American detention, American deportation, and American family separation, then wrap the shipment in a Union Jack.
That is the unstated concession. The policy is not native to the small-boats debate. It is American policy being rebranded for British soil. Reform UK is offering the British right a transactional relationship with American state violence: a franchise model in which ICE’s methods are re-exported through Dover.
The machinery already has its British packaging. Mass deportations. Detention regimes. Deportation flights. The Royal Navy in the Channel. “We’ll take him back with us.” A grin where a white paper should be.
The British political class has spent years performing seriousness while small boats continued to cross the Channel. That failure is real. People have the right to ask whether a government can control its borders, enforce its laws, process asylum claims, and protect the people who live within its jurisdiction. A state that cannot do those things honestly has failed in its first duties.
But the existence of that failure does not turn cruelty into competence.
A queue at an immigration tribunal is still made of human lives. A detention bed is still a room in which a person waits without freedom. A deportation flight still carries a family’s future in the hold. The administrative word does not cleanse the human act.
The Torah says, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” He also says, “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The test is not whether a policy can be announced with the vocabulary of sovereignty. The test is what the policy does to the stranger placed in its hands.
Reform UK wants the result without the accounting. It wants voters to see the boats intercepted and not the families detained. It wants the deportation number and not the child at the bus station. It wants “security” to mean that the state can reach anyone, anywhere, while “order” means that the harmed person has no meaningful appeal.
We in Britain have helped build the moral climate in which this offer can sound like common sense. We have treated migrants as a problem before treating them as neighbors. We have allowed the word “illegal” to turn a person into a category and a category into permission. We have watched the Channel become a stage on which human beings are displayed as evidence of governmental weakness.
That complicity does not make Farage’s proposal less cruel. It makes the proposal more legible.
Andy Burnham, who has taken over from Keir Starmer, is due to meet Trump in New York next week. Trump has called Burnham “extremely liberal” while praising his openness to further North Sea drilling. Burnham’s task is diplomatic containment: to remain commercially agreeable while avoiding political submission to the American enforcement model.
But you cannot contain a man whose domestic constituency is made up of his admirers. Farage is trying to make Homan the bridge between Washington and the British right. The bridge is built from detention cells.
Farage has also shown that his sovereignty is selective. He distanced himself from Trump in April, saying they had not spoken for months and questioning Trump’s judgment over Iran. Earlier this week, he broke with Trump again after the president said he would like to see a united Ireland. Farage answered that “Northern Ireland is a proud and integral part of the United Kingdom” and that its people “neither want a referendum nor unification.”
He wants the Trump method without every Trump conclusion. He wants the deportations, the force, the theater, the political permission structure. He does not want the consequences that offend his own national story.
That is not independence. It is selection from a catalogue.
Romero once addressed soldiers who were ordered to kill: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!” The command matters because it names the machinery and the people caught beneath it. It does not call repression “border control” and ask the wounded to admire the efficiency.
Nigel, the door is still open. You can abandon this import licence. You can demand a border system that is orderly without being cruel, enforceable without making families expendable, and firm without treating the stranger as an enemy by nature. That system would process claims, protect refugees, prosecute genuine crimes, punish exploitative employers, and give people a lawful path to work and belonging. It would defend the common good without worshipping the machinery of force.
But the door of return does not turn a cage into a home.
The next election will ask whether British voters recognize the offer. Reform’s pitch is not simply a tougher border. It is American methods on British soil, with a British flag wrapped around the import.
Anyone who heard “hijack” and laughed understood the joke. The question is whether Britain will let the joke become law.