Tokyo — The Japanese government has abolished a 16-year-old practice of notifying lawyers representing foreign nationals two months before their scheduled deportation, a move that took effect on February 1 and has drawn immediate condemnation from the country's bar federation.
The Immigration Services Agency cited operational disruptions as justification for ending the notification system. Since 2019, at least seven foreign nationals went temporarily missing after receiving advance notice of their deportation dates, the agency said. Protests timed to coincide with planned repatriations had also caused disruptions to agency operations.
The notification system was established in 2010 under a formal agreement with the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, designed to give legal representatives time to file lawsuits or other legal challenges seeking to halt deportations. Under the existing framework, approximately 50 notifications were issued by the Tokyo Regional Immigration Services Bureau alone in 2025. A total of 249 foreign nationals were forcibly deported with escort officers in 2024, according to agency data — the pool of cases to which the notification system applied.
The Mainichi Shimbun reported the policy change on Sunday, citing a Kyodo News dispatch.
What lawyers say
The bar federation released a statement calling the abolition "a unilateral measure lacking fact-based examination and sincere consultations between the parties involved." The federation argues that the move infringes upon foreigners' right to seek judicial relief against deportation orders — a constitutional guarantee that applies regardless of immigration status.
A central objection concerns timing. The agency has confirmed it will continue to inform the foreign national directly that deportation will be deferred for one month after the decision is made, allowing time to file a lawsuit. But the bar federation contends this is insufficient: without knowing the specific deportation date, lawyers cannot prepare adequately, and one month is too short to mount a meaningful legal challenge — particularly when clients may have limited Japanese-language ability and restricted access to communication.
The characters 大弁護士連合会 — the Japan Federation of Bar Associations — carry an implicit institutional weight that reflects the organisation's foundational role as a check on state power. Its confrontation with the immigration agency goes to a basic question of due process: at what point does administrative efficiency override an individual's right to contest state action?
Japan's immigration contradiction
The policy shift sits in uncomfortable tension with another direction of government policy. Japan is simultaneously accelerating its acceptance of foreign workers — the country admitted a record number of specified skilled workers in 2024 and expanded its long-term care and construction visa categories — while tightening enforcement against those who fall outside those channels.
The Immigration Services Agency has stated its intention to double the number of deportations with escort officials between 2024 and 2027, a target that frames the elimination of advance lawyer notifications as one element of a broader enforcement expansion.
Within the Liberal Democratic Party, the policy has exposed a quiet fault line. A faction aligned with business groups that depend on migrant labour has pushed back against hardline immigration enforcement, arguing the optics of aggressive deportation undercut Japan's efforts to attract skilled foreign workers in an intensifying global competition for talent. That debate remains largely internal; no prominent LDP figure has publicly broken with the agency's position.
The practical arithmetic is stark. Japan's working-age population is shrinking at a rate the government's own demographic projections describe as unprecedented among major economies. The total fertility rate stood at 1.20 in 2023, the lowest on record, and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research projects the total population will fall below 100 million by 2056. Enforcement alone is not a demographic strategy.
The bar federation's public statement signals it intends to continue pressing the issue through advocacy and, potentially, litigation. The agency told the federation in January that it was terminating the advance notice arrangement after talks in July 2025 ended without agreement — a sequencing that the federation described as a fait accompli, not a consultation.
