The EU opens the door to mass deportations, but resistance is still possible
By Alexandre Bovey, Research and Investigations at the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN). Published on 3 March 2026.
Header image credits: Hans Harbig
Much ink has been spilled about the despicable anti-migrant policies currently being deployed in the United States of America. And rightly so. But, unfortunately, the EU is not faring much better either.
On February 10, the European Parliament chose to expand the EU’s already deeply oppressive and inhumane border regime. A majority of MEPs passed a revision of the deportations regulation that will give EU states even more power to reject migrants and deport them back to potentially dangerous situations.
There is sometimes an unhelpful habit on the part of European politicians and media to claim that the U.S. law enforcement is uniquely brutal. Although it’s clear that the situation in the US is horrible, we should never minimize the injustices and violence that’s happening in our own backyard. In this context, and in light of the terror and countless abuses against immigrant communities that we’ve witnessed under Donald Trump’s second term, it’s essential to realize how dangerous this latest legislation on deportations is.
Most notably, it is rooted in a decades-long process of normalising the violation of the safety and dignity of people on the move. With almost no exceptions, EU and national authorities have shown no willingness to respect their human rights. The media itself and the majority of politicians have chosen migrants as the go-to political scapegoat. This means that as many brave people have done in the US, we need to take a stand on behalf of the vulnerable members in our communities. We have to keep them safe.
Photo action against ICE at the European Parliament, taken on 12 February 2026. Credits: The Left EU
Setting the Stage for Mass Deportations
This replacement of the previous legal framework concerning deportations is the result of a nearly year-long process. In March 2025, when the European Commission presented a new proposal - euphemistically called “Return Regulation” - to replace the “Return Directive” from 2008. On that same day, over 200 human rights organisations published a joint statement warning about the dangers of that new regulation. But throughout the rest of the year, the European Parliament double downed and indeed added amendments that only worsened this law.
On 26 January 2026, 16 UN Special Rapporteurs joined calls to reject this new legislation. But on February 10, the European Parliament (EP) overwhelmingly supported it.
The greatest support came from the three far-right parliamentary groups - Europe of Nations (ESN), Patriots for Europe (PfE), and the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) - but also significantly from the rightwing European People’s Party (EPP), the largest group in the EP. In addition, the centrist Renew group partly supported it as well (and some MEPs abstained), as the EP’s lead negotiator and Renew MEP Malik Azmani was behind some of the legislation’s worse positions. Even within the centre-left Socialists & Democrats group, 20 MEPs endorsed that legislation.
Using legalistic terms like “returns”, “return hubs”, and “safe countries of origin” or “safe third countries”, the EU has effectively reinforced the conditions for mass deportations. In reality, “returns” mean deportations, “return hubs” constitute offshore detention centers/deportation prisons, and the “safe countries” are in fact unsafe places allowing for the externalisation of the detention of migrants and asylum seekers.
This is the core of the new deportation regulation. It means that people who are refused asylum could be sent to places where they would face violence and death. They don’t even have to have set foot in that country before, provided a European government has signed an agreement with the receiving country to take them.
And there is more. The deportations regulation will increase discrimination and surveillance, by expanding mass data collection, racial and religious profiling, predictive algorithms and automated decision-making. It will introduce a range of new punitive responses that facilitate deportations (sometimes under the guise of making it “voluntary”), including fines, entry bans and the withdrawal of benefits. In another striking parallel with what is happening (especially with ICE) in the US, the legislation also gives law enforcement the power to raid homes.
The content of the law and the distribution of MEPs’ votes indicate that the bulk of rightwing and centrist EU politicians have fully adhered to the anti-migrant worldview and program of the far right. At the very least, they are courting the far right’s electoral base, which is no less outrageous since the human rights and safety of people on the move are at stake.
The European Border Regime is Indefensible
This expansion of the EU’s deportation regime isn’t coming out of the blue, rather it confirms the consistent immorality and brutality of the European border regime since at least the 1990s. With tens of thousands of people dead because of it - mostly lying at the bottom of the graveyard that the Mediterranean sea has turned into -, Aimé Césaire’s words come to mind: Europe is Indefensible.
In many ways, while the second Trump administration constitutes a fascist regime at all levels, in Europe fascist practices have so far been applied mainly against people on the move. There is no more accurate way to describe the systematic brutality and injustices of the European border regime, both at the EU and national levels.
Since 2008, Frontex - the EU’s Border Agency - has distributed about €2 billion in grants to EU and Schengen member states, in order to build and expand “Fortress Europe”. And its power and budget keep increasing: for the 2028-2034 period, the European Commission has proposed giving Frontex €11.2 billion.
Deportations are nothing new in Europe, with deportations carried out via charter flights a common practice since the 2000s. Brutal and often illegal pushbacks are also widespread, both by national authorities and Frontex. This has been extensively documented by the Border Violence Monitoring Network, Bellingcat and Lighthouse Reports. Frontex’s complicity in these pushbacks has been established, and for last year only at least 80,865 pushbacks were recorded. Refugees have also been arbitrarily detained and tortured at secret facilities - or black sites - in Bulgaria, Hungary and Croatia.
The more specific background of this latest deportation regulation is the EU’s “externalisation” strategy which has expanded greatly in the past decade. The deportation, policing and detention of migrants doesn’t stop at the EU’s borders. It has expanded - under the name of “migration management” - to nearby regions, with the EU funding and contributing to governments’ own abuses and violence against migrants. These countries are in part located around the Mediterranean (Turkey, Libya, Algeria, Morocco), but also beyond it to Sudan, West Africa (e.g. Senegal, Mali, Niger, Mauritania), and more.
A fence in Konya, Turkey. Credits: Nuh Köstekli
Perhaps the most shocking part of Europe’s externalisation strategy is that it supports and is indirectly involved in dumping tens of thousands of Black people in desert or remote areas in North African countries to prevent them from reaching the continent. According to Lighthouse Reports, in Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, people on the move are racially profiled, loaded onto buses and left in remote desert areas where they lack food, water and other necessities. They are at risk of being kidnapped, sexually abused, extorted and/or dying. Some are “taken to border areas where they are reportedly sold by the authorities to human traffickers and gangs who torture them for ransom.”
By normalising Italy’s unlawful “Albania Model” - and the similar agreement between the Dutch government and Uganda - with this new deportation law, the EU is paving the way for countless injustices and violations of innocent people’s safety, freedom and dignity.
The USA as a foreshadowing of the mass deportation the EU wants to implement in Europe…
While the EU didn’t wait for Trump’s second term to develop its own anti-migrant brutality, what is happening across the pond is certainly a dark foretelling of what this latest piece of regulation could unleash. Indeed, this latest vote by rightwing and far-right MEPs can partly be interpreted as a deliberate imitation of the atrocities committed by that government. And like the Democrats for over twenty years contributed to the growing power of DHS and ICE, in Europe the centrist and rightwing MEPs decided to open the door for mass deportations…
The DHS (Department of Homeland Security) under Trump - including ICE, the Border Patrol and other agencies - has been extremely brutal: kidnapping people off the streets, raiding homes and schools, shooting dozens of people, deporting immigrants to foreign prisons, putting children in concentration camps, and detaining countless people in horrible conditions.
As Steve Bloomfield wrote, the situation in Minneapolis is a concrete example of the terror that mass deportation means in practice:
"Thousands of armed, masked officers have invaded the city against the wishes of its democratically elected leadership and police force. They are rounding up thousands of people – snatching them off the street, pulling them out of their cars, forcing their way into their homes. They are lying in wait outside nurseries and schools, picking off staff at shops, turning up at construction sites.
People are being targeted because of the colour of their skin or the language they are speaking. The agents are using reckless violence, pepper spraying protesters in the face, employing dangerous choke holds and, as we are all too aware following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, unafraid to shoot whomever they want.
This is what a mass deportation programme actually looks like."
… but also an inspiring example of grassroots resistance
At the same time, the examples of Los Angeles and Minneapolis are also ones demonstrating the power of ordinary people - neighbours, workers, students - coming together to protect and care for each other.
Samuel Karlin wrote a powerful dispatch on the remarkable resistance in Minneapolis, saying that “every inch of the Twin Cities is being touched by people’s determination to defend their immigrant neighbors”. Regular people are doing what they can to support immigrants who are scared to leave their homes, and keeping watch on ICE activity. Last month, tens of thousands of people there went on strike and marched against ICE, despite the cold weather.
Kos, Greece, in 2018. Credits: Miko Guzuik
Recently, one member of the European Commission criticised Spain’s plan to grant legal status to a half million undocumented migrants, as being “not in line with the EU's approach to migration”. I don’t think we can rely on or wait for EU authorities to grow a conscience, and unfortunately this kind of humane policy from Spain is the exception, rather than the rule, when it comes to national governments.
As the U.S. example shows, when authorities refuse to treat immigrants and refugees with respect and human dignity, it’s the duty of ordinary citizens to step up and do everything we can to keep our neighbors and communities safe.
This is the spirit behind the We Keep Us Safe project, which seeks to “connect our struggles, showing none of us are isolated, and we all want the same thing: A Europe where communities are safe”. This campaign is trying to link different groups all over the continent who are resisting deportations, detention and raids. They are keeping EU politicians accountable and calling on authorities to support people on the move with safe pathways, housing, healthcare and education. Please sign and share their petition “Say No to Mass Deportations in Europe”, the next vote on this deportation legislation is in March!
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