Brexit Brit locked up in Swedish detention centre then deported

British national Nigel Davies, who missed the post-Brexit deadline to get residency in Sweden, was this month seized by Swedish police, locked up for three nights and then forcibly deported to the UK.

“I’m 63 years old. I’ve been living here in Sweden for 16 years. I have a house, a family home, two children, a dog,” Davies told The Local.

“I’m very bitter at the Swedish police, migration authorities, and government. I’ve been failed by a lot of organisations. And the British embassy has been absolutely worthless,” said the father of two.

Unexpected arrest

The problems began for Welsh-born Davies when he officially lost his right to reside in Sweden in February 2025 after missing the key post-Brexit residency deadline years earlier.

Brits living in Sweden and other EU countries were guaranteed their right to legally remain after Brexit as part of the Withdrawal Agreement. However British nationals in Sweden had to formally apply for their post Brexit status by December 31st, 2021.

Those, like Davies, who missed the deadline, faced a legal battle to stay and numerous bureaucratic obstacles.

Davies had been required to sign in at his local police station in Helsingborg twice a week. But when he went to sign in as usual earlier this month he was approached by two Swedish police officers.

They read him a three page charge sheet which accused him, among other things, of “absconding” by failing to sign in on one of his required dates. He was then driven to the Migration Agency’s detention centre in Åstorp, some 20 km outside Helsingborg.

He says he was then locked in a cell and only allowed out for two 30-minute exercise sessions a day.

“People call it a ‘detention centre’, but it’s a prison in every way, shape and form,” Davies said. “The rules are exactly like a prison. The staff treat you as if they’re working in a prison. The food is probably worse than a prison. It is disgusting slop.”

For the next four days and three nights, Davies tried to get help from friends and family.

“All I had was a pair of shorts and a T shirt. I had nothing at all. I only had my phone. I didn’t even have my wallet with me. All of it was left in the car, which I had parked outside the police station,” he said.

The police had taken his phone when he was arrested, so it was only when he was allowed to put his sim card in the old phone provided by the detention centre that he could contact family.

He was promised a lawyer on his first day, but each day passed without one arriving, and then on the evening of his third night in the cell, he was told he would be deported to the UK the next day. By that time, his neighbours had brought him a small rucksack with a spare pair of socks and pants, T shirts, and shorts.

“I was woken up at 4am and two policemen loaded me into a van, and I was treated like a prisoner. I was treated like El Chapo. Over the next three or four or five hours, I was treated like a drug dealer. It was disgusting, absolutely disgusting,” he said.

The two policemen guarding him changed vehicles in a high security facility in Malmö and then he was driven to Copenhagen Airport and marched onto the plane. The two border guards remained on the flight with him.

“I was flanked by two badged police officers all the way through Copenhagen Airport, and they were making a performance, doing the pantomime, going to the front of the queue, getting on the plane first as if I was top priority,” said Davies.

“It was very humiliating, considering I’ve never committed a crime. All the staff were looking at me as if to say, ‘oh my god, have we seen this guy on the news. What has he done? Who was he killed?’. That was the feeling, and it was horrible,” said Davies.

Once they arrived in London, however, the situation changed entirely. He was given his UK passport and his smartphone back. He was given free train tickets to Cardiff, the nearest big city to his former home in the west of Wales.

The Swedish border policeman, who had accompanied him on the flight, even went so far as to tell him that as he was a UK citizen with no stamps on his passport he was entitled to visa-free entry to Sweden, so there was in fact nothing to stop him getting straight on the next plane back to Copenhagen.

“I said, ‘well, then what was the point?’,” Davies said. “I saw the paperwork. These were business class tickets that the Swedish government has paid: 7,000 kronor per person. And these two guards had to fly back to Gothenburg as well.”

Mitigating circumstances

The detention and deportation marks the latest in what Davies sees as a succession of unfair treatment by the Swedish migration authorities and border police, starting with the refusal to grant him post-Brexit residency in 2022 – he claims because he submitted his application six days after the strict deadline.

Davies wasn’t alone, in fact hundreds of Brits were left fighting to stay on in Sweden after having missed the date to submit their applications to stay in the country post-Brexit. The country has an unusually high rate of rejections, with data at the end of 2023 showing that 22 percent of residence applications from UK nationals under the Withdrawal Agreement had not been successful in Sweden.

The Local last year interviewed the former Bollywood actor Kenny Solomons, who was forced to leave Sweden in 2024 after failing to get post-Brexit residency, like Davies for missing the deadline. Solomons’ case made national news in Sweden thanks to his marriage to the singer of the disco band Alcazar.

The reason that Davies failed to sign in at his local police station on the day in question, he contends, was that it was closed.

“It was a red day [public holiday] in Sweden, and I’ve actually got a dated photograph of me outside the locked police station, but in their strange mentality, that counts as absconding,” he said.

As for his late application to apply for post-Brexit residency in Sweden, Davies claims he was under strain due to the illness of his wife, who died three years ago.

“My wife was at that time dying of cancer here in Helsingborg and it was during the Covid pandemic, so the hospital weren’t sending people out to help in the house. They blankly refused, even though she had terminal with breast cancer.”

After applying late Davies was denied residency in Sweden. He then lost his appeal against the decision which he blames on his “incompetent” lawyer. He carried on living in Sweden despite having lost his right to residency.

It was only once his daughter turned 18 years old, however, that the Swedish authorities made concrete moves to deport him, although he was detained in Gothenburg in February for four days when she was still 17 years old.

Lost all respect

Davies says he now has no desire to live in Sweden, and has returned only to sell his house, pack up and relocate, first to the UK, and then ideally to Denmark, where his children now live.

Like many Brits living abroad, Davies wasn’t eligible to vote in the referendum on leaving the EU, but said he was sympathetic in many ways to the Leave side. He said he did not expect to be personally affected by the outcome of the referendum.

But his anger remains directed at Swedish authorities.

“I’ve lost all respect for Sweden and for the rest of my life and probably my children’s lives, whenever we speak to someone who says, ‘Sweden’s a very social, accepting country. I’m going to say ‘No, it’s not’. That’s my personal crusade, to tell people what the Swedish government, migration department and police have done to me.”

The Local has contacted the Migration Agency for a response, but officials say they are not able to comment on individual cases.

Brexit Brit locked up in Swedish detention centre then deported

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