A family from Uzbekistan has been portrayed as heart-rending victims of Sweden’s deportation policy in both Swedish and international press. But the truth is different.
It has now been revealed that the family has remained in Sweden since 2005 – despite having received no fewer than 47 deportation orders since then.
Per Gudmundson on the website 100% has investigated the case of the Uzbek couple Elena and Dmitriy Gaffarov. The website was founded by the well-known YouTube figure Henrik Jönsson, who is also editor-in-chief.
The couple’s situation has been used in a number of news articles to portray Swedish deportation policy as inhumane.
“This is racism as social engineering,” writes Aftonbladet editor Anders Lindberg in an editorial.
“Just like the Nazis,” writes the left-wing newspaper Dagens ETC. SVT reports that the couple have “worked, paid taxes and settled down for more than two decades”.
Svenska Dagbladet allows the two to say that they are being treated as though they “were criminals”. Dagens Nyheter writes that the parents “learned Swedish, educated themselves, and that both have jobs in professions with labour shortages”.
Even Le Monde has joined the wave and published its own tearful article about the case: “They were taken away by police at dawn,” writes the French newspaper.
This is only a small selection of all the media coverage concerning this family’s situation.
But since 2005 the couple have received a total of 47 rejections from the Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket), the Migration Court (Migrationsdomstolen) and the Migration Court of Appeal (Migrationsöverdomstolen).
The couple each received 17 rejections separately. Their son received his first deportation order in February 2007. He received 13 rejections before being granted permanent residence in March 2025, after 18 years in Sweden.
He was granted citizenship in February this year – by the Tidö parties. Speaking to SVT, he refers to himself as a child, even though he is around 20 years old and has a cohabiting partner.
The couple applied to remain in Sweden on the grounds that their son had become a Swedish citizen, but even this application was rejected.
Migration Minister Johan Forssell (M) does not wish to comment on this individual case, but says with one hundred per cent certainty that “important parts of the background” are often omitted when the media report on deportation cases.
Forssell emphasises that a rejection must be followed up by the applicant leaving the country.
– Otherwise it is impossible to grant asylum to the people who genuinely need protection.