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A deportation flight left the UK for Jamaica with a quarter of the passengers due to leave the country.
The Interior Ministry said 13 people were on the scheduled flight that was originally supposed to carry 50 passengers.
All 13 had combined jail terms of more than 100 years, including three convicted of murder, another of involuntary manslaughter, while others had been convicted of crimes such as grooming, drug trafficking, burglary and robbery, he said.
Campaign groups and human rights lawyers launched a series of last-minute legal challenges, which meant that many of the 50 passengers did not board the plane.
Some Jamaican citizens who were supposed to be on the plane are said to have been granted a legal pardon after the Home Office allegedly recognized that they could be victims of modern day slavery.
Calls were made to the Interior Minister, Priti Patel, to stop the flight.
According to charities, lawyers had also gone to court to prevent parents who were to be on the flight from being separated from their children, who would be left behind in the UK.
Home Secretary Chris Philp said: “In the early hours of this morning, 13 serious foreign criminals were deported from the UK.
“It is disappointing that immigration law firms continue to use last minute tactics to remove significant numbers of violators from this flight.
“These people had every opportunity to raise claims in the days and weeks leading up to the flight; however, a significant number of claims were not filed until hours before the flight departed, meaning the killers and rapists have been able to stay in the UK. “
Speaking in the House of Lords on Tuesday, Conservative leader Baroness Williams of Trafford said all deportees had served a prison term of a year or more, including some for “very serious crimes.”
Activists tried to stop the flight amid the continuing fallout from the Windrush scandal, in which people with the right to live in the UK were unfairly detained or expelled.
However, the government insisted that the flight was to get “dangerous foreign criminals” out of the country and that none of the offenders were eligible for Windrush’s compensation plan.
Dozens of MPs wrote to Home Secretary Priti Patel calling for the flight to be canceled, saying that “some of those affected came to this country as children. Many now have children of their own. Britain is their home.”
The signatories, which included Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Caroline Lucas and John McDonnell, said: “The deportations epitomize the government’s continuing hostile environment agenda.”
Speaking in the Lords on Tuesday, former Conservative Minister Lord Vaizey of Didcot noted that deportations were taking place under legislation passed by the last Labor government and that expulsions to Jamaica represent only a very small percentage of those carried out each year.
He said: “It is totally wrong to combine the Windrush scandal with this case. The government is dealing with the consequences of the Windrush scandal, but this case has nothing to do with it.”
