New research exposes racist reality of UK citizenship stripping laws that place 3 in 5 people of colour are at risk

Stripped: The Citizenship Divide shows that up to nine million people are vulnerable to having their British citizenship stripped, three million more than previously estimated. People of colour are twelve times as likely to be at risk as their white peers.

This research draws on new census data, the Annual Population Survey and Home Office parental records to bring the estimate up to date. It reveals a shocking racial disparity: three in five people of colour are vulnerable to being deprived of citizenship, compared to just one in twenty of their white neighbours.

Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust, said: “There is a chilling undercurrent of citizenship stripping at the discretion of the Home Office, under which almost two thirds of Black British and British Asian people are at risk of having their UK citizenship stripped. That is an extremely concerning trajectory. Just like the legislation which caused the Windrush Scandal, there are no effective checks  to prevent these powers being used widely. 

“Citizenship is a right, not a privilege. Yet successive governments are advancing a two-tiered approach to citizenship, setting a dangerous precedent that someone’s citizenship can be removed on 'good' or 'bad' behaviour, with the actual operation of it being most impactful on people of colour. How has our democracy become so degraded that this is not treated with the alarm that it should?”

Maya Foa, CEO of Reprieve, said: “The previous government stripped British trafficking victims of citizenship for political gain, and the current government has just expanded these extreme and secretive powers. With Reform leading in the polls, the nine million people whose rights could be taken away by the next Home Secretary have every reason to be worried.

Treating people with a family connection to another country as second class citizens is an affront to the foundational British principle of equality before the law. We are British, not Brit-ish. These discriminatory powers must be abolished.”

The analysis finds that legislation and government practice in this area have created a fundamentally racist, two-tier citizenship regime.

Under current laws, the Home Secretary may strip citizenship if they determine that to do so would be “conducive to the public good”. This is a concentrated executive power, taken based on secret evidence that the person stripped may never be able to see or challenge.

Any Brit with dual nationality could be stripped. Naturalised Brits may also be stripped if the Home Secretary has “reasonable grounds for believing” they may be able to claim a second nationality, whether or not they have actually done so. In practice, these powers have been used against people with a tenuous or non-existent claim to another nationality, leaving them effectively stateless.

The Nationality and Borders Act (2022) grants the Home Secretary the power to strip a person of citizenship without notifying them. The Deprivation of Citizenship Orders (Effect during Appeal) Act, passed by the current government in October 2025, means that even in cases where a court has found the Home Secretary to have acted unlawfully in stripping a British national of their citizenship, they do not get their citizenship back until all appeals by the government have been exhausted – a process that often takes many years.

The legal rights of people with a connection to another country are less secure than those without such connections, and can be taken away with a stroke of the Home Secretary’s pen.

This new analysis shows that around 13% of the UK population is at risk of having their citizenship stripped.

When broken down by ethnicity, relative to the percentage of the UK population, 62% of Black British people (1.6 million), 62% of people of ‘Other’ ethnicity (0.7 million) and 60% of Asian British people (3.3 million) are at risk of being deprived of their citizenship, compared with just 5% of White British people (2.4 million).

Mass deprivation of citizenship by the UK Government is a modern development, reviving a practice which had been rejected as extreme and contrary to the rule of  law, following the Second World War. It fell almost completely into disuse across Europe, in revulsion at the Nazis stripping the citizenship of Jewish citizens of Germany. 

From 1973-2002 there were no deprivations of UK citizenship, other than for fraud. But since 2010, more than 200 people have been stripped of their citizenship on “public good” grounds. In this period, only Bahrain and Nicaragua have deprived more people of citizenship on this basis. No other G20 country strips citizenship in bulk. Prior reports have stated that the vast majority of those the UK has deprived are Muslim people with South Asian, Middle Eastern or North African heritage.

For at-risk communities, these extreme (and extremely broad) powers are of grave concern, at a time when racist sentiment is increasingly expressed and endorsed by the political and media establishment. The Conservative Party has floated proposals to deport large numbers of legally settled people from Britain, the Reform party has promised to deport more than half a million people if elected, and prominent nationalist voices have called for massively increased use of citizenship deprivation powers.

In light of the concerning findings in this report, the Runnymede Trust and Reprieve are calling for an immediate moratorium on the use of citizenship deprivation powers for the “public good,” the abolition of Section 40(2) of the British Nationality Act 1981, which grants the Home Secretary this power, and the reinstatement of the British citizenship of all those who have been deprived on this basis.