On 12 September, The Guardian visited the arrivals terminal at Heathrow Airport to meet Charles, a British citizen who had recently been expelled from Sweden. Charles, now 60 years old, had spent five years trying to regularize his legal status in Sweden but was ultimately unsuccessful. He was taken to a detention center in Stockholm, marking the end of his long and complicated journey. According to The Guardian, Charles is the only child of his parents, has no children of his own, and owns no property in the United Kingdom, making him effectively homeless in his native country. He had not set foot in the UK since 2022, during a brief one-week visit, and before that since 2017, when he moved to Sweden to join his Swedish wife. Charles’s case is one of many involving British citizens living in Sweden. Since the United Kingdom officially left the European Union in 2020—commonly referred to as Brexit—Sweden has issued expulsion notices to 2,500 British citizens, out of an estimated 14,000 living in the country. These notices are part of a broader effort by European countries to manage the legal status of UK nationals after Brexit, which changed the rules on residency and work rights for British citizens in the EU. According to Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish newspaper, 458 British nationals have been deported to the border since the start of the Brexit process, based on the latest figures provided by the Swedish Migration Agency on 9 September. Sweden is responsible for a third of all the expulsion notices issued to British citizens across the EU, highlighting its significant role in this issue. The situation has sparked debate about the impact of Brexit on the lives of British citizens living in other EU countries. Many, like Charles, have spent years building lives in their host countries, only to face the possibility of sudden removal due to changes in immigration laws. As the UK and EU continue to navigate the long-term consequences of Brexit, cases like Charles’s underscore the human cost of policy changes.