MASS deportations of the sort promised by Nigel Farage are a recipe for horrific abuses of justice.

We are already seeing this in Trump’s United States, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers are intimidating schoolchildren, wrongfully deporting people (including to a mega-prison in the Washington-friendly dictatorship of El Salvador) and holding them in internment camps where their basic rights are violated.

An emphasis on detainees being “out of sight, out of mind” facilitates ill-treatment — a Human Rights Watch report on three Florida centres found delays to medical treatment that could be tied to deaths, rampant overcrowding and women being held alongside men in men’s facilities.

Farage is an admirer of Trump and wants out of the European Convention of Human Rights and a “temporary” withdrawal from the 1951 Refugee Convention to facilitate similar outrages here.

Reform UK’s target of 600,000 deportations in a parliamentary term would encourage exactly the sleights of hand we have seen in the United States, with people seized on the streets and wrongfully detained or removed. We know from the Windrush scandal that these would include people with every right to be here.

The prosecution of the plan would be racist. Police racism has been well documented through incidents like the strip-searching of Child Q or the leaked Charing Cross WhatsApp scandal. Racist behaviour by outsourced staff at the Manston refugee holding camp had to be condemned by the Home Office and contractor Mitie after a guard’s remark “f*** off you n******, back to where you came from” was “blasted out” from portable radios across the site.

A new Deportation Command would inevitably share these characteristics and would target black people and those from immigrant backgrounds. The streets, the workplace and homes would become unsafe.

The nightmarish character of this vision does not mean it won’t work for Farage. The Tory response (that he has “copied their homework”) and that of Labour (that the scheme is impractical and it is already ramping up deportation numbers) reinforce the narrative that the deportations are necessary while allowing Reform to present itself as the only party ambitious enough to act boldly.

Socialists and anti-racists have a big job to do to counter this poison.

We should campaign for an end to the segregation of asylum-seekers in hotels and the crooked system whereby big contractors profit from housing them — incentivising their concentration in the most deprived and therefore cheapest areas. That of course does not reduce the importance of mobilising outside hotels to protect those inside from intimidation and violence.

Where possible and safe — as has been done at a number of counter-protests — those drawn to hotel protests should be engaged about their motives with an eye to demolishing evidence-free myths that depict real crises — such as the intolerable levels of abuse and harassment of women and girls — as linked to refugee numbers.

We also need a revival of street politics — one we see being born in the Palestine solidarity movement but which can go wider. One that involves a left presence in communities and brings people together in campaigning on local as well as national and international issues. Class unity is the antidote to racism and division.

The enemy have the march on us and success is by no means guaranteed. But there is a big left in Britain, evident in the huge peace movement and the scale of interest in a new left party. Absent class politics, this could simply lead to polarisation on the US model, which there and internationally the right have tended to do best from.

But — as Corbyn’s Labour showed in 2017, where it raised the Labour vote significantly across the whole country, north and south, urban and rural, Labour or Tory stronghold — it is genuinely possible to break through when the left is united, radically anti-Establishment and outward-looking.