Forssell told public radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio that the government is considering following Denmark's lead on letting Brits who had their post-Brexit status rejected reapply.
"That's the kind of thing we're going to look into, whether it's possible and how it has worked in Denmark," he said, after several cases of Brits being handed deportation notices despite having lived in Sweden for decades sparked headlines in Sweden and internationally.
The Danish government in 2023 announced that hundreds of British nationals who had missed the deadline for post-Brexit residency status would be allowed to apply or reapply.
But a spokesperson for Forssell's predecessor, Maria Malmer Stenergard, told The Local at the time that a similar reprieve was not being planned in Sweden, months after the minister was shocked to learn from our reporter about the high number of expulsions of Brits.
It appears that the government may now be changing its mind.
"As migration minister I am completely focused on helping the Brits. We want things to be as good as possible for Brits in Sweden, of course," Johan Forssell told Sveriges Radio.
"But you also have a personal responsibility. If you have received several reminders from the Migration Agency to apply for a residence permit but still didn't, of course it's a very sad situation, and one I'm truly sorry about," he added.
Forssell's claim about people receiving several reminders from the Migration Agency is false. While the agency did publish information on its website and social media, and spoke about it in several other channels, Sweden, unlike many other countries, never contacted Brits directly.
Sweden's unusually high deportation rate of Brits post-Brexit, which The Local has been covering since at least 2023, has received widespread media attention in recent months.
The Withdrawal Agreement, under which Britain left the EU, was intended to protect the rights of British people living in the EU, giving them the legal right to stay in the EU country they lived in. Implementation was left up to individual countries.
While most countries let Brits stay – on average only 4 percent of applications were rejected across the EU – Sweden is an apparent exception. Fully 27.5 percent of applications from British citizens were rejected by the Swedish authorities. Sweden accounts for roughly one-third of all deportation or removal orders issued to British nationals across the entire EU post-Brexit, according to statistics from the UK-EU committee on citizens' rights.
They include people like John Sellers, who has lived in Sweden since he was ten and is now stuck in the UK with no clear route back to his Swedish wife; George Mason, who requires 24-hour care for Alzheimer's; or 78-year-old widow Joyce Thomas.
A rejected application is not the equivalent of actually leaving Sweden (some may have received other permits or been able to stay in other ways), but the Migration Agency confirmed to The Guardian in September 2026 that 458 British citizens have been deported or forcibly removed by police since Brexit.
In Denmark, at least 350 British nationals who lived in Denmark at the time of Brexit failed to apply to remain in the country before the deadline of the end of 2021, after designated letters to remind them were not sent out due to a technical error. Many of them were subsequently given orders to leave.
But after criticism from rights groups, who accused Danish immigration authorities of not correctly applying the rules of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, the Danish government announced that the deadline would be extended until the end of 2023.
The Local's editor, Emma Löfgren, argued in an opinion piece in 2023 that Sweden should follow Denmark's lead.
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