Home Office faces suit over almost 1,500 EU residency cases

Campaign group the3million filed High Court papers on Friday suing the Home Office over almost 1,500 EU citizens stripped of all or some post-Brexit UK residency rights.

The statement of claim alleges the Home Office breached the Brexit withdrawal agreement. The case matches the scale of a dispute Atlas360 reported in September involving 1,473 EU citizens whose residency status had been revoked.

The claim concerns people who had been granted pre-settled status, a UK residency category created after Brexit, but were later told by the Home Office that those grants had been made in error. The affected group is far larger than the several individual cases that first drew attention to the policy.

According to the statement of claim, the Home Office acted without the “procedural protections” required by the withdrawal agreement. Those protections include an appeal route and a proportionality assessment before rights are removed.

Monique Hawkins, acting chief executive of the3million, said: “The Home Office is putting the cart before the horse. It denies people the safeguards the withdrawal agreement guarantees – a fair assessment and a right of appeal – because it says they are ‘clearly’ not covered by the agreement. That’s like saying someone doesn’t need a trial because they’re ‘clearly’ guilty.”

The challenge asks the High Court to declare the Home Office’s “grant in error policy” unlawful under the withdrawal agreement and/or common law. the3million also seeks an order removing the disputed elements of the published policy.

The dispute has focused partly on Brazilian Italians who said they were Italian citizens by jure sanguinis, meaning citizenship by descent. The Home Office had told some applicants that status was wrongly granted because they did not hold an Italian passport when they applied, according to the claim.

In October 2026, the Home Office accepted that people who provide evidence of Italian citizenship obtained through jure sanguinis would be treated as Italian from birth. Hawkins said that reversal showed the department could alter policy when mistakes were identified.

One affected case involved a 33-year-old Brazilian Italian engineer in London since 2018, whose wife was initially told she could not remain in the UK before the decision was reversed in recent weeks. Another involved an NHS worker studying for a dentistry PhD, who told the3million the Home Office notification had “turned her life upside down.”

Lawyers for the claimants argue that the EU settlement scheme’s flexibility makes the Home Office policy harder to justify. The court papers said some grants involved evidential flexibility or discretion, leaving status holders unable to know why approval had originally been given.

The Home Office has faced previous litigation over its handling of post-Brexit EU citizens’ rights. In 2022, the Independent Monitoring Authority, backed by the3million, challenged rules requiring people with pre-settled status to reapply for settled status when their existing status expired. High Court judges ruled those conditions unlawful.

A Home Office spokesperson said the department could not comment while proceedings were ongoing.

Source: court papers reported by The Guardian – Europe, Nov. 7, 2026.