It’s not surprising that Shabana Mahmood finds that some of her recent changes to border policy are undergoing judicial review. A cynic might say that is where the proposals were destined to end up.

The latest case involves guidance that was issued in September 2025. It concerns individuals who entered the country illegally, were already subject to deportation orders, and then lodged appeals claiming they were victims of “modern slavery.” It has now been reported that as many as four in 10 Channel migrants earmarked for deportation are claiming to be victims of modern slavery in an attempt to prevent their removal.

Previously, claims made under the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) automatically halted removal from the UK. A 45-day pause was imposed while officials decided whether there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the individual had been subjected to modern slavery. If that threshold was met, removal was delayed for much longer while a final determination was made.

Under the Home Secretary’s new guidance, individuals would be removed first, and then the case would be decided upon. This was to be a critical element of the Prime Minister’s “One-in, One-out” deal with Emmanuel Macron, allowing the UK to swap deportees with France without any fear of last-minute NRM claims.

To some, Shabana Mahmood should be lauded for going through with changes to the guidelines despite Home Office lawyers likely telling her that it would be challenged by the courts. But there is a lengthy history of home secretaries announcing bold border policy reform, safe in the knowledge that the courts would spare them from delivering it. We’re therefore justified in assuming that the whole thing was a charade.

The deeper problem lies with the Modern Slavery Act (MSA) itself, legislation introduced by a previous home secretary, Theresa May. At the time, May presented the act as evidence of a tough stance on illegal migration. Once in Downing Street, she recast herself as a compassionate liberal, elevating the MSA into a flagship reform. Intended to make life harder for those exploiting illegal migrants, the law has instead become one of the most formidable obstacles to deporting people who enter the country illegally.

The MSA is riddled with inconsistent and vague definitions; lawyers, commentators, judges and politicians are given a huge amount of scope to argue their own interpretation of what modern slavery actually is, as are claimants themselves. The biggest hurdle for the Home Office is that the Act’s definitions of “human trafficking” can quite easily be interpreted to include the very methods that illegal immigrants use to enter the country. This is because it involves professional criminal gangs charging eye-watering sums.

As a result, campaigners may argue that all small boat migrants are victims of human trafficking by default, and as such are subject to modern slavery protections. The claim of modern slavery, therefore, becomes difficult, expensive and extremely slow to falsify.

As the law currently stands, it is unlikely that judicial review would lead the High Court to give the Home Office clearance to resume deportations before modern slavery claims are resolved. Nor are judicial interventions likely to meet serious resistance from government, given Labour’s limited appetite for reforming the Modern Slavery Act itself. Even by its own modest benchmarks, the One-in, One-out scheme has resulted in a net transfer of just 62 migrants from France to Britain. Shabana Mahmood’s function, it increasingly appears, is to provide a thin veneer of legal plausibility — reforms calibrated to survive judicial scrutiny — while allowing the Prime Minister, in practice, to look the other way on illegal immigration.

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Chris Bayliss is an independent consultant who works on energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

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