The Home Office is being sued at the high court after stripping almost 1,500 EU citizens of their full rights to live in the UK — rights originally granted under the EU Settlement Scheme after Brexit. Campaign group the3million lodged papers on Friday alleging the Home Office's "grant in error" policy violates the Brexit withdrawal agreement by denying affected citizens the procedural protections that treaty guarantees: a right of appeal and an assessment of proportionality. The core of the legal argument is structural, not technical. The UK deliberately designed a settlement scheme that was more generous than the withdrawal agreement required, minimising evidence burdens and granting caseworkers discretionary flexibility. Now the Home Office is retroactively reclassifying some of those grants as "errors" — but without telling affected citizens whether their status derived from the treaty, from domestic law, from caseworker discretion, or was genuinely mistaken. The people affected have no way to know which category they fall into, and the Home Office isn't telling them before pulling the rug. Among those caught in the policy: a 33-year-old Brazilian Italian engineer living in London since 2018, who was told his settled status was an error and that his Brazilian wife could not remain — a decision reversed only after the3million intervened. An NHS worker studying for a PhD in dentistry reported the notification "turned her life upside down." These are not marginal cases. These are people who built careers, families, and lives on the basis of official government decisions. The Brazilian Italian cases expose a particular absurdity. Under Italian law, citizens who obtain nationality through jure sanguinis — direct descent from an Italian relative — are Italian from birth. The Home Office initially rejected this, insisting applicants needed an Italian passport at the time of application. Many could not obtain passports because Italian consular offices were shut during the pandemic. In October 2026, the Home Office quietly accepted the jure sanguinis argument, acknowledging these individuals were Italian from birth. But the broader "grant in error" policy remains unchanged. This is not the first time the Home Office has been sued over withdrawal agreement implementation. In 2022, the Independent Monitoring Authority — the statutory watchdog created specifically to oversee this process — took the Home Office to court for forcing EU citizens to reapply for settled status when pre-settled status expired. High court judges ruled in the IMA's favour, finding the conditions unlawful. The pattern is consistent: the Home Office implements policies that erode EU citizens' rights, gets challenged, loses, and repeats. The3million is asking the court to declare the grant-in-error policy unlawful and to excise the offending parts. Monique Hawkins, acting CEO, framed it bluntly: "It's like saying someone doesn't need a trial because they're 'clearly' guilty." The Home Office declined to comment, citing ongoing proceedings. The deeper question is whether the UK is honouring the withdrawal agreement in substance or merely in letterhead. A scheme designed to be generous at the front end becomes a trap when generosity is retroactively recharacterised as error — especially when the affected citizens have no mechanism to contest the reclassification before their rights disappear.
