Ekeroth: “Deport More – Introduce Retroactive Deportations”

EDITORIAL • Sweden has been naive. Believe it or not. Sweden didn’t see it coming. Anyone surprised? In the autumn of 2010, when the Sweden Democrats (SD) entered parliament, I already had my favorite proposal ready – deportation. In it, I presented eight different motions on how the law should be changed. These proposals were actively opposed by the other seven parties for eight years, and even for a while after, right up until the 2022 election when SD and the three other government parties started the Tidö cooperation.

So, it took twelve years. During that time, both the Moderates, the Social Democrats, and the other parties managed to produce one foolish and absurd argument after another to maintain a completely clueless policy on the deportation of non-citizens. Today, several of my proposals from 2010 have become government policy. Among them is this motion:

Deportation should become a mandatory part for the court to consider in criminal cases where the defendant holds citizenship in a country other than Sweden, or is stateless.

Samnytt’s Mats Dagerlind recently wrote about this phenomenon as well, from the perspective that it’s unreasonable that no one has to explain why the law isn’t being applied.

However, much has happened, and since Tidö took over, a number of positive changes are underway. As Samnytt recently reported, Sweden now – thanks to SD – aims to have the toughest deportation laws in the Nordics. Personally, I believe these legislative changes should have been in place within Tidö’s first six months, but it’s always easy to demand a faster pace from the outside. At least now it will happen – something that never would have occurred under the Social Democrats.

The problem, however, is that too many people over the years have avoided deportation due to our lax laws. They will therefore continue to stay even if the rules are now tightened. Such an arrangement should not be accepted.

Retroactive Legislation

Critics argue that retroactive deportation goes against the rule of law. That’s not quite true. Deportation is an administrative migration measure, not a punishment. The state has the sovereign right to decide who may reside here – and stricter rules can be applied even to earlier crimes.

A clear example is the USA’s 1996 reforms (IIRIRA and AEDPA). Congress significantly expanded which crimes made foreigners deportable and made those changes explicitly retroactive. People could suddenly be deported for crimes committed decades earlier under the new rules. The courts accepted this since deportation is not considered a criminal penalty, but a civil measure.

A similar development has occurred in the United Kingdom. The UK Borders Act 2007 introduced automatic deportation for foreign nationals sentenced to at least 12 months in prison – a rule applied to previously convicted persons. Later legislative changes have enabled immediate deportation straight after sentencing, and have been applied to people already in custody. Several EU countries have similarly expanded deportation for serious crimes and terrorism with retroactive effect for earlier offenses.

Sweden can follow the same path. In fact, the government’s own inquiry, SOU 2025:99, notes the following:

No general prohibition of such legislation exists in other areas of law either, although it has been considered that such legislation should as a rule be avoided. Weighty reasons have nevertheless justified retroactive effect in several cases.

Residence permits are a privilege for non-citizens. Anyone who commits a crime forfeits that right. Protecting society from the risk of reoffending is a core duty of the state – and retroactive application is both reasonable and consistent with precedent in the Western world as well as with our own inquiries.

Therefore, Tidö, led by SD, should advocate for the retroactive deportation of all non-citizens who, due to previous lax legislation, have not been deported. Once citizenship begins to be revoked, this retroactivity should include them as well.

Should it apply to absolutely all crimes? Well, perhaps not. It should be focused on crimes against persons and weighed against any benefit the individual may have brought – or brings – to the country. For example, I think it should take very little to deport a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) immigrant who has committed a crime against another person.

Regardless of the precise threshold, I recommend people listen to me now, because I tend to see things coming: introduce retroactive legislation for deportation, and make Sweden a little better and a little safer.