Sweden’s teen deportations were far more widespread than reported

Of the 539 case decisions from 2025 linked to work and study permits – which The Local obtained through a freedom of information request – 127 were clear teen deportation cases, where an 18- to 21-year-old who had come to Sweden as a dependent was ordered to leave Sweden while their parent was granted or still had a permit.

In a further 89 cases, the dependent or former dependent was denied a permit before a decision had been taken on the parent's extension, or else the parent's status was unclear. 

This compares to the just 92 cases of so-called teen deportations identified in a similar analysis carried out by the Aftonbladet newspaper and published at the end of March. 

In their analysis, Aftonbladet's journalists only requested rejection decisions for young people applying for residency on the basis of family reunion, apparently not realising that the Migration Agency treats the applications of dependants of work permit and study permit holders as work permit and study cases rather than family reunion cases. 

The Local is publishing this analysis as Sweden's parliament prepares to vote on a new family reunion bill which contains the government's long awaited solution to the problem of teen deportations.The issue became one of the biggest stories in the Swedish media at the start of this year, long after the issue was first raised by The Local in 2022.  

When the media storm around deportations was at its peak at the end of February, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson claimed that the problem only affected "a handful of individual cases". 

If a similar number of the dependants of foreign workers were hit by teen deportation cases in 2023, 2024 and the first few months of 2026, it is likely that well over 500 families have been affected. 

Niels Paarup-Petersen, immigration spokesperson for the Centre Party, said that The Local's new statistics showed that Kristersson's claim had been misleading.  

"The government said it was 'just a few cases' but now its clear that it's a lot," he told The Local, pointing out that although teen deportations had not been treated in the Swedish media as a business issue, the phenomenon had a real impact on employers, and as a result on the economy. 

"I've spoken to people who are highly skilled, highly paid and at the top of Swedish business who have had their kids deported," he said. "Of course that has an impact on competitiveness."

"I think teenage deportations do not get enough attention," agreed Youstbi Djuanvat, an immigration lawyer at Edelweiss Legal. "Policies that discourage highly qualified professionals from choosing Sweden by forcing their teenage children to leave the country upon reaching adulthood will undoubtedly have a detrimental impact on our economy."

READ ALSO: Volvo engineer’s family forced out of Sweden by teen deportation law

What we did

The Local submitted a freedom of information request to the Migration Agency at the start of April for all rejection decisions on permit applications and extensions involving relatives of work permit holders, relatives of work permit holders who originally applied for asylum, relatives of people with self-employed permits, and relatives of doctoral students.

At the end of June, the agency started sending us the first two or three pages of case decisions on 672 cases, of which 134 turned out to be duplicates. 

We then analysed each of the 539 cases to identify those where the applicant was already living in Sweden, had had their application rejected, and where their parent either still had a valid permit or had had their permit accepted. 

READ ALSO: 'Sweden is saying it wants experienced workers, but not their kids'

Why were work permit holders' children rejected? 

The most common reason dependants of work permit holders were rejected was that they had been caught in the "teen deportation trap", which The Local has extensively reported on.

This happens when a work permit holder is granted a permanent residency permit, in many cases without realising that while the maximum age for a dependant of a permanent residency holder is only 18, for work permit holders, it is 21. 

Of the cases analysed by The Local, at least 59 were rejected because their parent had received permanent residency and the applicant no longer qualified for a permit as a dependant as a result, despite being under the age of 21.  

If the new bill that includes the 'teen deportation safety valve' law is passed on August 13th and comes into force in October as planned, the maximum age of dependency will be raised to 21 as a general rule for all permit types, meaning the discrepancy between work permits and permanent residency will disappear. 

Before teen deportations became a major media issue in Sweden in February, the government had planned to lower the maximum age of dependency for work permits to 18 instead, which would have led to a significant increase in the number of teen deportations. 

Another common reason for rejection (affecting at least seven cases) was that the parent had switched from a work permit to a permit on the basis of self-employment, which, like permanent residency, sets the maximum age of dependency at 18.

Another was the applicant themselves, realising they no longer qualified as a dependent, had applied for a new permit on different grounds and had attempted to apply from within Sweden. 

In other cases, the parent did not meet the maintenance requirement or the young person, who originally came as a dependant, had had an application for a work permit rejected for other reasons. 

In other cases, it was not clear from the information in the first three pages why the applicant was rejected.