The UK's Guardian newspaper has led the recent coverage, reporting on the case of Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old retired nurse who has lived in Sweden for 21 years who faces deportation because of a late application, and the case of Horace Mason, a 74-year-old man who faces deportation despite requiring constant care in a home for his severe Alzheimer's.

In Sweden, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper (and The Local) spoke to Nichola Stanlick, who risks being ordered to return to the UK, despite coming to Sweden when she was seven years old and being, in everything apart from her country of birth and her citizenship, basically Swedish.

Sweden's uniquely strict approach to applications for post-Brexit residency under the UK Withdrawal Agreement is nothing new. The Local reported on it extensively back in 2024, speaking to several of the British citizens rejected, and covering the cases of the Bollywood actor Kenny Solomons, who is married to Swedish popstar Tess Merkel, and Welsh truck driver Nigel Davies.

'A lot of cans were kicked down the road'

David Milstead, a Stockholm University physicist who volunteers for the Brits in Sweden group, says the recent wave of deportation orders is an "aftershock", following on from way Sweden's Migration Agency opted to deal with the first wave of post-Brexit rejections in 2023 and 2024.

"The reason why we're still seeing deportations now is because a lot of cans were kicked down the road," he told The Local.

When the Migration Agency rejected applications for post-Brexit residency – either because they were late or because they did not consider them to fulfil the requirements, it very often offered temporary residency under Swedish national law, normally on the grounds of family connections or work.

"People were given these temporary reprieves, but Sweden has really toughened up its national residence laws, so it has become very difficult for these people to go on and get permanent residency under national law, and they just end up leaving."

"So to some extent, this is a kind of aftershock."

Since the Tidö government took power in October 2022, Sweden has massively raised the minimum salary requirement for a work permit, and also raised the maintenance and housing requirements for family reunion, making it difficult for Brits who are not in well-paid jobs to renew their temporary permits.

One woman, who runs a Facebook group for Britons refused post-Brexit residency, said that she expected to get her temporary residency permit, which is based on her relationship with her 16-year-old daughter, renewed in December. But she added that she expected to lose her right to stay in Sweden once her daughter turned 18.

"Everything crossed, I get another two years, but otherwise I can't stay in Sweden," she told The Local. "I have accepted that my expiry date is looming, and there are others still struggling."

**Why is Sweden an outlier? **

Exactly how many Britons have been refused residency is uncertain, but Sweden has clearly been rejecting far more than any other EU nation.

According to Eurostat numbers, Sweden has issued deportation orders to 2,500 British nationals since 2021, a third of the total number of Brits ordered to leave across the EU. The UK Foreign Office calculates fully 27.5 percent of Britons in Sweden were refused post-Brexit residency, compared to an EU average of under 4 percent.

Milstead says that this is partly a result of Sweden's unusually strict interpretation of EU residence requirements and partly a side effect of Sweden's tradition of independent government agencies, which government ministers can only control through legislation, an annual letter of instructions, and written orders.

"I don't think anyone sat down and thought, 'Gosh, let's make life difficult for the Brits'. They probably wanted the opposite, but there was no great political will to make sure that didn't happen," he told The Local.

The strict interpretation of EU residency requirements, which EU lawyers complained to The Local about back in 2024, predates Brexit, but was not previously too much of a problem, Milstead argues, as EU citizens were almost never in practice deported, even when refused a formal right of residence.

"The way Sweden applies EU law makes life a bit difficult and inconvenient for EU citizens, but the Withdrawal Agreement is basically normal EU residence law minus the protections against deportation EU citizens have, so there was a kind of inevitability that Brits going through the new legal regime were going to find a lot of them had to leave."

When assessing both post-Brexit residency and EU residency rights, Sweden imposes an extremely strict interpretation of the requirements for income, employment, housing, and savings in the years leading up to the application.

Under EU law, there is a "reasonable grounds" clause giving wiggle room for those who applied late for post-Brexit residency. As far as Milstead is aware, not one of the rejected applicants has ever been excused a late application on "reasonable grounds".

The Withdrawal Agreement also requires national authorities to offer redress procedures which should "ensure that the decision [to reject] is not disproportionate".

Many EU lawyers would argue the decisions to deport Thomas, Mason, and previously Kathleen Poole, clearly failed this proportionality test, but the Swedish Migration Courts have upheld the Migration Agency's decisions in these cases nonetheless.

**Can anything be done? **

The European Commission, the guarantor of the rights of UK citizens in EU countries, has so far declined to take action to enforce them.

The Commission told The Local back in 2024, that "it is not for the Commission to tell Member States how strict or lenient they should be when processing late applications".

On August 19th this year, following the revived media interest in the issue, it reiterated this position.

"Host States have a certain margin of discretion in deciding what they accept as reasonable grounds for having missed the application deadline in relation to the specific situation of the applicant," the Commission's spokesperson told The Local. "On the basis of the information available to the Commission at this stage, the Withdrawal Agreement is correctly implemented in the Member States."

There is also nothing to prevent the current Swedish government or a future one from passing a law or issuing an order to the Migration Agency which would help some or all of the UK citizens facing deportation.