‘A lot of fear’: the families bearing brunt of Sweden’s immigration crackdown

“Sweden did this for us,” said Sofiye*, making a supportive scooping up gesture with her hands. “And then, bam.” She dropped them to the ground.Sofiye, who has three children, arrived in Sweden from Uzbekistan as an asylum seeker in 2008, and for much of that time she was able to build a life in the Scandinavian country. The family lived in a flat in a Stockholm suburb and Sofiye worked for the municipality in the home help department. She learned Swedish and her children went through the Swedish school system. Her youngest son was born in Sweden and her 18-year-old son, Hamza, who is studying in college to be a technician, doesn’t know life anywhere else.Three years ago, however, after unsuccessfully seeking refugee status four times, Sofiye lost her right to work and is now living under the threat of a deportation order. For the last two years she and two of her children have been living in limbo in an asylum return centre in an industrial area near Stockholm’s Arlanda airportThe situation is causing her so much anxiety that for the last two months she has lost her appetite and been vomiting with stress. As she spoke to the Guardian she held a plastic bag into which she regularly retched.The asylum return centre near Stockholm’s Arlanda airport. The Swedish migration agency said it had made efforts to ensure the centres were appropriate for children. Photograph: Josefine Stenersen/The Guardian“I cannot sleep. I sleep just one or two hours. I throw up. I am so stressed. I don’t want to speak to the children because here,” she said, pointing to her head, “is occupied. I don’t know physically, mentally what I should do.”The centre, one of a growing number of reception and return facilities aimed at housing an estimated 11,000 asylum seekers in the coming years, is part of Sweden’s increasingly hostile asylum and immigration policy. The centre-right government, which depends on the support of the far-right Sweden-democrats" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="9626" data-entity-type="organization">Sweden Democrats, says it wants to “redirect focus” away from receiving asylum seekers to instead becoming a “country for labour immigration”.The government recently celebrated data showing that Sweden had its lowest level of asylum seekers since 1985, claiming that lower numbers “create better conditions for successful integration”. Thousands of people like Sofiye – who have lived in Sweden for years and are well-established in society and the job market, with children who were born in Sweden – face deportation.Among the recent policy changes include asylum seekers being placed in reception centres instead of being provided with individual accommodation who are then offered “repatriation grants” to leave the country voluntarily.The government has also introduced stricter conditions for gaining citizenship and tightened family reunification rules. Applicants must prove their identity through an in-person visit and provide more documentation than was previously the case.Committing a crime can now result in losing the right to live in Sweden for anyone who is not a Swedish citizen. In 2025 a total of 440 people were subjected to criminal deportations, according to government figures.“If you do not want to become part of this community, you should not come to Sweden,” the government has stated.A ‘refugees welcome’ demonstration in Gothenburg in 2015. The attitude towards immigration in Sweden has hardened in the years since. Photograph: Scanpix Sweden/ReutersThe hostile environment is a far cry from Sweden’s immigration policies of the past. In 2014, at the start of a period when the number of people arriving to Europe from countries in the Middle East rose sharply, the then prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, made a speech urging Swedes to “open your hearts” to newcomers.The direction of travel is unlikely to change even with a general election next year, say observers, as the main political parties, including the opposition centre-left Social Democrats (SD), have embraced similar hardline policies.“Many people that we meet say to us: ‘We came to Sweden believing this was a country that respected human rights: where are they?’” said Nannie Sköld, a counsellor at Stockholm Stadsmission’s Who Am I Tomorrow? project, which provides legal and psychosocial support to individuals and families with deportation orders.The latest government figures show that 8,312 people returned to their home countries in 2025, the highest number in a decade, while the number of asylum seekers decreased by 30% on the previous year.“We meet people who came to Sweden for work or to study, and people who don’t have grounds for asylum,” said Sköld. “We also meet people who are fleeing from the Taliban or they are LGBTQ from Uganda, and who then see that their request for international protection is denied.”One of the changes that was having a particularly damaging impact is the decision to abolish “track changes”, she said. The new rule, which came into force at short notice last April, prevents people who have had their asylum applications rejected from applying for a residence permit, even if they have worked in Sweden. It also prevents those who had already obtained a work permit from extending it.The decision is estimated to have put 4,700 people who were established in Swedish society at risk of deportation.Sköld added: “People [who] are well integrated and established in Sweden … are asking: ‘What else could I have done? … How could I possibly prove my worth if even doing everything that is supposedly correct isn’t enough and will never be enough?’”Life in the return centres is tough. The facility near Arlanda, which also houses new arrivals, is an “open” centre, meaning people can come and go. But getting around from there is logistically difficult and many people are getting by on a few kronor a day. It was a difficult place to be in for children, said Sköld, who said her team heard from LGBTQ asylum seekers that the shared spaces could feel unsafe. Many there suffer from poor mental health as a result of their precarious circumstances.“There is a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety,” she said. “People who have received a deportation order fear being deported any day.”Thamer says his sons are willing and able to work. Photograph: Josefine Stenersen/The GuardianThamer and Faten are a married couple who came to Sweden from Iraq on work visas with their two sons, who are now 20 and 16. Their third son was born in Sweden in 2021. But they now face deportation after their asylum applications were denied and work visas expired. Thamer said that a criminal organisation has threatened to harm their children if they return to Iraq.“There are people who have lived in Sweden for 30 years but they don’t talk Swedish like me,” said Thamer, 52. “I write as well, not just speak. What do they want more than that? I am not a criminal.”Thamer said he was offered a job as a car mechanic but was unable to take it because his work visa had expired. “Sweden wants men and I have three. Can they not make use of them?”The Swedish migration agency said it was unable to comment on individual cases. It was “working to ensure that the [reception and return centres] are safe for everyone staying there, with particular consideration given to children and other vulnerable groups, such as LGBTQ persons”, a spokesperson said.*Those interviewed requested their surnames not be published as their cases are in process