Sweden targets non-deportable offenders with benefit and work bans

Sweden is preparing to get “tougher” on people who are ordered deported but cannot actually be removed. The government proposes that, when expulsion is blocked by temporary obstacles, deportation should be “postponed as a main rule” rather than converting the stalemate into a one-year temporary residence permit that can include work rights and access to certain benefits. Migration Minister Johan Forssell says the aim is to ensure that serious offenders and security threats awaiting removal do not get to work, receive benefits, or “travel freely in Europe,” according to TT via Aftonbladet. The changes are proposed to take effect on 1 June 2026.

This is the Swedish policy rhythm: first the state fails at a basic function (enforcing its own deportation decisions), then it compensates by expanding domestic control regimes over the people it cannot move.

The human cost of the failure shows up in court reporting. Sydsvenskan describes a 26-year-old man with alleged gang connections who, after an initial sexual assault against two 14-year-old schoolgirls in Vellinge, was released—then went on to rape a young woman in a hotel room at Malmö Live and sexually assault her friend. He has now been sentenced to four years in prison. Yet he will not be deported.

The government’s proposed fix does not solve the core problem highlighted by such cases: the gap between a deportation order and the state’s ability (or willingness) to execute it. Instead, it shifts emphasis toward making life inside Sweden more restrictive for the “non-removable”—a category that can persist for years.

This is the worst of both worlds. Sweden maintains a high-trust, paperwork-heavy migration and asylum framework that generates legal and practical barriers to removal, then uses those barriers as justification for more coercion: expanded supervision, curtailed rights, and a semi-carceral limbo for people the state insists should not be here.

If the state cannot deport someone it labels a serious criminal or security threat, the honest options are limited and politically uncomfortable: either stop importing the problem by tightening entry and residency pathways in ways that reduce future non-removability, or accept that “deportation” is often performative and redesign criminal justice around that reality.

Instead, Stockholm is choosing a third way: keep the inflow, keep the legal constraints, keep the non-enforcement—and build a thicker internal control state to manage the consequences. It is an elegant bureaucratic solution, in the sense that it creates new administrative levers while avoiding the embarrassing question of why the old ones never worked.