Serco Wants to Be the European ICE, Human Rights Groups Say

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Outsourcing giant Serco has been accused of positioning itself as “ICE in the UK and Europe” after appointing a new director from G4S, one of the main contractors for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

In late March, Serco Group announced Fiona Walters as CEO of its UK and Europe division. Walters came to Serco from private security firm G4S, which has provided transport and armed security services to ICE during the agency’s recent immigration crackdown, which has involved extrajudicial killings. Walters was previously regional CEO for G4S in the UK and Ireland. 

Serco currently runs several UK immigration removal centres, including the notorious Yarl’s Wood, along with Brook House, Tinsley House and Derwentside. In the past fortnight alone, the company has announced two further major UK government contracts: one with the Home Office, as the main contractor for HM Passport Office’s contact centre, a £72.9m deal that will run until February 2028; and one with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), a seven-year deal to repair and maintain a fleet of over 500 specialised vessels in Portsmouth. 

In its 2025 annual report, Serco, which also runs five adult prisons in the UK, noted a continued demand for “our broad range of services and expertise” in immigration “as policy, conflict and climate change influences crossborder movements”. The company also claimed to have “accelerated our growth, increased our market share and enhanced our capabilities” in immigration through the acquisition of smaller companies. 

Sarah Chander, director of European anti-racism organisation Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice, said: “Serco is positioning itself as ICE for the UK and Europe.” 

Amnesty International UK told Novara Media that private companies, not unlike smuggling gangs, are “profiting from political hostility towards vulnerable people”, whether they’re crossing borders for work, study, joining family or seeking safety.

Steve Valdez-Symonds, refugee and migrant rights director for Amnesty International UK, said: “Licensed businesses operating under government contracts, such as Serco, are no less exploitative than anyone else when they make profits from policy that blatantly, even intentionally, tramples all over people’s human dignity and rights.”

“Sadly, in the UK, the US and elsewhere, political leaders continue to adopt increasingly brutal approaches to immigration and asylum and we are concerned that companies like Serco are prepared to ignore awful human consequences in chasing the money that’s on offer.”

Paul O’Connor, head of bargaining at the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) – the UK’s largest civil service trade union – slammed the use of “costly and ineffective” detention and deportation centres, and said “Serco other contractors should not be seeking to profit from inhumanity”.

O’Connor added: “PCS considers that detention/deportation centres in many countries are a direct consequence of poor asylum and immigration policy that is driven by racist rhetoric.”

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A number of corporations linked to ICE are currently contracted with the UK government.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud infrastructure and services to the US Department of Homeland Security’s agencies, which include ICE, which bought $25m (£18.8m) of its cloud systems in September. 

In 2023, AWS secured a three-year £450m Home Office contract, triple the value of its previous UK government partnership. Thirty-five UK public sector authorities currently use AWS’s services, according to public procurement intelligence firm Tussell, which calculates that the company has won 189 UK government contracts worth £1.7bn since 2016.

US spytech firm Palantir is one of ICE’s biggest suppliers, with a contract worth around $140m (£105m), and has made a tool specifically for ICE that allows the agency to map areas for potential deportation targets, using government health data among other data sources.

Palantir is also deeply embedded in UK state infrastructure, holding more than £670m in government contracts across the NHS, policing and defence. The company was handed yet another sensitive UK government contract just last week by the Financial Conduct Authority, which includes recordings of phone calls, emails and trawls of social media posts. 

Human rights campaigners say the hiring of Walters to Serco from G4S represents an “alarming revolving door” between the UK’s immigration system and ICE. 

G4S, a subsidiary of Allied Universal, the world’s largest provider of private security guards, currently provides “transportation services to process aliens” in Los Angeles and Phoenix, and “ground transportation services in support of enforcement and removal operations” in San Francisco. In the UK, G4S currently holds at least £53m in government contracts across NHS properties and the MoD. G4S was also a long-term provider of security guards for job centres – a contract now in the hands of another private contractor, Mitie.

Mallika Balakrishnan, a digital organiser for Migrants Organise, said: “Serco’s appointment of a former G4S executive as its new UK and Europe CEO illustrates the alarming revolving door of profiteers receiving public funds to enable inhumane, anti-migrant policies from detention centres to 24/7 GPS surveillance.”

The government’s relationship with G4S has been marred by controversy, after the firm was found to have made more than £14m from Brook House between 2012 and 2018, despite serious failings including the alleged assaults, humiliation and verbal abuse of detainees by officers.

In the 2013 prisoner tagging scandal, both Serco and G4S were found to have defrauded the government by maintaining inaccurate records and charging UK taxpayers for the application of electronic tags to offenders who were either no longer being tagged, in prison or deceased. Serco and G4S ultimately paid fines and costs totalling more than £250m. 

Yarl’s Wood detention centre, run by Serco, was found to be unsafe after a government inspection in 2023.

The Home Office bragged in February that approximately 60,000 unauthorised migrants and convicted criminals have been removed or deported from the UK since Labour took office in 2024, with home secretary Shabana Mahmood saying “we must go further to remove those that have no right to be in our country” and promising to “do whatever it takes to restore order and control”. 

Reform UK – which is expected to make massive gains in the May local and devolved parliamentary elections, and is still polling as the most popular party by Westminster voting intention – has promised to create an ICE-style deportation agency. The party’s Zia Yusuf said in February that mass deportations would be carried out by a planned UK Deportation Command with the capacity to detain 24,000 people at any one time and deport up to 288,000 annually, operating five flights a day.

Serco’s appointment of Walters came three days after the European parliament approved a controversial ‘return regulation’ law on 26 March, enabling member states to build deportation centres in third countries outside the EU for irregular migrants, increasing the legal detention period to up to two years, and imposing virtually unlimited entry bans on returned migrants.

Serco and G4S have been approached for comment.