A 78-year-old British widow facing deportation over from Sweden over Brexit has said she feels she is facing a “death sentence” just hours before she was due to be removed from the country. I am really not the same person I was. I just feel sick,” she adds as she packs her bags.
Thomas, a retired nurse, who has lived in Sweden for 22 years, was given four weeks to leave the country in August, separating her from her son, grandchildren, large network of friends, her church and her husband’s grave. Her husband, Gwynne, died in 2023 of cancer. It was on a trip back from the UK in 2022, when they visited their second son in Brighton, that they first learned they should have made a formal application to stay in Sweden after Brexit.
Her subsequent application to stay in the country in 2023 missed the official deadline but she said her husband who looked after all the household administration, had previously been told there was nothing the couple needed to do after Brexit. She was first told to leave the country in November and after an appeal received the news in August that the administrative court in Luleå upheld Sweden’s migration agency decision that she could not stay. The migration agency says that simply not knowing she had to apply to stay by the cutoff date at the end of 2021 was not a “reasonable ground” for staying in the country.
So Thomas had little choice on Monday: she got up at 6am to thoroughly clean her flat, cook for supporters that night, and pack her bags for the UK. Then, late on Monday evening, she was advised that she could stay pending a late application by a lawyer for a review of the removal order. However, her plight remains the same with the threat of a deportation merely in abeyance.
I need a peaceful life at my time of life. I just want to get up and be normal,” says Thomas. Thomas is one of hundreds, potentially thousands of Britons who have either been told to leave voluntarily or removed forcibly through deportation since Brexit.
Last week the migration agency confirmed it had already deported 458 including one 34-year-old who had been in the country since he was 10. Another British businessman was taken into detention last week in Stockholm to be deported. I think they would think twice because it is the worst think they can do to a human being,” says Thomas.
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