The 78-year-old British widow threatened with removal from Sweden after 21 years has said she has been left feeling sick with worry after being told she had lost an appeal against deportation in a ongoing row over the country’s handling of Brexit. An individual’s life is at stake at my age. I have done nothing wrong.
I don’t take anything from this country. I am self sufficient, I put money in this country, have no criminal record,” said Joyce Thomas from her home in Sweden on Thursday. Her plight, first revealed by the Guardian, has raised concerns in Brussels and in the UK about Sweden’s approach to the EU-UK withdrawal agreement, which was supposed to protect British nationals who lived in an EU member state before Brexit.
Earlier this week another family told how their father, a dementia patient in full-time care, was also threatened with removal after 25 years in Sweden. The administrative court in Luleå upheld Sweden’s migration agency decision that Thomas was not eligible to stay because her application was made in 2023, after the cut-off date of December 2021. Her legal representatives told the court in Luleå it was “not proportionate for her to be deported solely because she missed a deadline due to insufficient information.
Furthermore, it is not acceptable that the Swedish authorities failed to inform her that she needed to file an application and of the deadline by which it was to be filed.” Thomas now faces the prospect of a letter from the migration agency giving her four weeks to leave voluntarily , separating her from her son, her grandchildren, her network of friends, and away from her husband’s grave, which she regularly visits. If she fails to comply, not only will she face a forced deportation, but the court of appeal has told her she could face a “re-entry ban” and “registered on a watchlist” preventing entry into a Schengen country, which includes Sweden “as long as the re-entry ban remains in effect”. Thomas argued that after 21 years all her support network was in Sweden, with 23 people including doctors, priests and friends and fellow churchgoers writing to testify in support of her case.
I get up in the morning, it’s in my head, I go to bed at night, it’s in my head. I mean I have done nothing wrong. I put money in the country.
I can’t comprehend this,” she added. Her husband died in 2023 from cancer just four months after his last trip back to the UK to visit family. It was on the return that he learned from border officials that they had to make a special application to stay after Brexit.
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