UK strips EU citizens of residency rights granted 'in error,' raising withdrawal agreement concerns

Gabriela has spent years building a life in Britain. She works in the NHS, conducts PhD research, pays taxes, and has woven herself into the fabric of a country that, five years ago, told her she could stay. Then, without warning, a letter arrived from the Home Office saying it had all been a mistake.

She is one of at least 100 EU citizens who have received such letters in recent months—notifications that their post-Brexit residency rights, granted years earlier under the EU settlement scheme, were issued "in error" and must now be revoked. The timing is brutal. These individuals are at the precise moment when their temporary "pre-settled status," valid for five years, is set to convert into permanent "settled status." Instead of that upgrade, they face the prospect of losing legal right to remain in the country altogether.

Gabriela's case hinges on a technicality that exposes the precariousness of the Home Office's review process. She is Brazilian-Portuguese—a dual national whose father is Portuguese, making her an EU citizen by birth. When she applied for pre-settled status, she did not hold a Portuguese passport, only her Brazilian one. The Home Office has now seized on this absence as grounds to declare her original grant of status invalid. In a five-page letter, officials wrote that she lacked "the evidence required to confirm that you meet the definition of 'relevant EEA citizen' before midnight 31 December 2020," the date the UK formally severed ties with the EU. Gabriela maintains she was transparent throughout her application, disclosing her Portuguese heritage and EU citizenship by descent—a status, she points out, that does not change based on which passport she happened to carry at any given moment.

The scale of the problem remains unclear. The Home Office has declined to disclose how many people it has contacted, but through a freedom of information request, the campaign group the3million learned that at least 95 people received letters in March alone. The organization fears the actual number could stretch into the hundreds or thousands as the Home Office conducts its broader retrospective review of cases involving children, non-EEA citizens, and anyone who arrived after the December 31, 2020 cutoff date.

The human consequences are immediate and sprawling. Gabriela describes the prospect of losing her status as overwhelming. She could lose her NHS job. She might be unable to rent her current home, since landlords require proof of legal residency. Her bank accounts could be frozen. She holds three separate employment contracts across different surgeries, and the collapse of her legal status would unravel all of them. "It's just very stressful," she said, understating the existential weight of having the ground shift beneath you after years of stability.

Her situation has triggered alarm at the Independent Monitoring Authority, the statutory body tasked with overseeing implementation of the EU citizens chapter of the Brexit withdrawal agreement. The IMA has raised formal concerns with the Home Office that this policy "may be incompatible with the EU withdrawal agreement." The withdrawal agreement stipulates that status should only be removed when genuinely proportionate to do so. Monique Hawkins, acting chief executive of the3million, argues the Home Office is "simply side-stepping" that requirement entirely. She describes the approach as "completely unacceptable," pointing out that these people applied in good faith, were granted status by the Home Office itself, and then built their lives on the basis of that decision. "Imagine building a life somewhere and having it ripped out from under you like this," she said.

The Home Office's response has been procedural rather than substantive. It says people judged to have been granted status in error can apply through other immigration routes, such as visa stays. It will allow them to remain until their pre-settled status expires, during which time they can pursue alternative arrangements or apply for full settled status. If that application is refused, they can appeal. But for people like Gabriela—who has already invested years in her career, her education, and her community—these alternatives feel like consolation prizes for a mistake the Home Office itself made. She is appealing the decision, but the broader question now hangs over thousands of others: how many more letters are coming?