The Home Office has sent letters telling five children and a pregnant woman to leave the UK, even though the families entered legally before the rules changed. The notices, seen by, have landed on children as young as five and on a woman who is six months pregnant and living in the UK with her husband.
The letters are being sought now because they show how quickly the government’s tighter rules on migrant care workers are reaching into family life. The children whose cases were seen have parents on care worker visas, a route that until March 2024 allowed workers to bring partners or children with them. From that date, that option was closed, and a ban on overseas recruitment of care workers followed in July 2025.
For Varuni Arachchige, the issue is not abstract. She said her family has been living legally in the UK since Christmas Day in 2022, that her visa has been extended by the Home Office until 2031, and that her husband and children, who are her dependants, have been told to leave the country. She said the children, aged eight and five, are thriving at school and settled in their community. “We are completely shocked by the family receiving these letters,” she said.
That is the detail that makes the letters hard to square with the government’s own timeline. The children who received them were already in the UK before the March 2024 rule change, yet they are being told to go even where the parent may still be allowed to remain. Lawyers said they have seen a rise in these cases in the past few weeks, a sign that the new system is not just closing future routes but is being applied to families already here.
Rasika Samarasinghe is facing that pressure too. He received a Home Office refusal allowing his dependants to stay in the UK after arriving in October 2022. He has a wife who works as a teaching assistant and three children aged 12, nine and eight. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.
The scale is wider than one family. In 2023, the Home Office estimated about 120,000 family members were in the UK, joining 100,000 care worker applicants. Sponsored migrant carers now provide 4.2 million hours of care a week for up to 280,000 people, which is why any disruption to the route carries consequences far beyond immigration paperwork.
The unanswered question is how far the Home Office is prepared to push this policy against people who entered lawfully under the old rules. If the letters are the start of a broader sweep, families already settled in Britain may find that legal entry no longer protects them from removal notices sent after the fact.
