The EU's ICE? How Europe's new deportation rules threaten migrants' rights, extend detention, and echo America's harsh immigration system

On 26 March, the EU Parliament adopted its position on the so-called "Return" Regulation, with critics warning it could pave the way for expanded detention, family separation and large-scale deportations.

While the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) patrols external borders with full impunity, despite numerous allegations of serious rights violations, this regulation is designed to harden the enforcement of internal borders.  

The compromise text adopted in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) significantly altered the EU Commission's proposal. 

The outcome reflects a deliberate alignment among the European People's Party (EPP), far-right parties such as Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance (MPSZ), Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and the French Rassemblement National (RN) to secure a majority.  

This vote further undermines the so-called "cordon sanitaire" and sets another dangerous precedent, despite warnings from human rights organisations.  

Dangerous escalation: Warnings of a shift towards mass deportation  

The proposed EU Return Regulation is designed to speed up and standardise the deportation procedures of people found to be staying irregularly in the European Union (EU).

If adopted, this regulation would replace the 2008 Return Directive, and regulations would apply directly to all member states without needing to be adopted into national law, unlike directives.  

According to Kathryn Porteous, UNHCR Regional Communications Officer, Bureau for Europe, the reform expands the range of countries to which individuals may be returned — including countries of transit, so-called "safe third countries" and potentially newly envisaged 'return hubs'.

It also introduces longer detention periods and extended entry bans. With both the EU Parliament and Council largely aligned on this agenda, negotiations are expected to advance rapidly.  

However, civil society groups warn that the regulation represents a qualitative change rather than administrative reform in both scale and intensity.

As Reshad Jalali, Senior Policy Officer from the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) notes, the proposal consolidates existing trends such as externalisation, expanded detention — including for children and authorising family separation — and accelerated procedures, while eroding procedural safeguards and introducing more forceful measures designed to enforce "cooperation". 

"In reality, critics warn that many people in an irregular situation could fall under at least one of these criteria," Jalali adds.  

By embedding deportations to third countries into migration governance, the regulation signals a broader shift toward a more security-driven logic, raising concerns about its compatibility with fundamental rights under EU law.   

'Return hubs' or deportation centres?  

One of the most controversial elements of the regulation is the creation of so-called "return hubs" in third countries, intended to facilitate deportations beyond European territory.

These centres could function as offshore detention facilities, where individuals may be held before deportation to countries of origin or, in some cases, to third countries with which they have limited or no prior connection. 

In this regard, five EU member states (Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Greece) are reportedly collaborating on plans to set up such centres, without publicly disclosing destination countries.  

Human rights organisations warn that these mechanisms could institutionalise externalisation while exposing individuals to degraded legal protections outside the union's jurisdiction.  

As Jalali notes, the text "reinforces efforts to shift responsibility beyond European borders, further embedding externalisation as a structural feature of the EU's migration governance, including deportations to third countries under more flexible and potentially less protective arrangements."  

The UN Refugee Agency has stressed that such transfers cannot strip EU states of legal obligations. As Kathryn Porteous explains: "States cannot relinquish responsibility for all asylum seekers and international transfers are not lawful when representing an attempt by a state to divest itself of its international duties."

The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) stresses that safeguards remain insufficiently reflected in the current proposal, raising concerns about implementation. 

"On border externalisation, we know that pushing migrants further and further away from jurisdictions in which they could claim asylum, exposes them to ill-treatment and violence," Kiri Olivia Santer, a social anthropology lecturer from the University of Bern, adds.  

Political agenda: From hostile to punitive politics? 

"Repeated experience with externalisation policies suggests that outcomes are likely to remain limited and, in some respects, counterproductive," Jalali states. 

Cooperation with third countries has consistently proven difficult to secure, leaving return rates largely dependent on factors beyond the EU's control.

Rather than addressing these structural issues, the current text seems to redirect its focus inward, expanding authoritarian and punitive measures to pressure individuals into "cooperating" with return procedures. 

In practice, as Silvia Carta, Advocacy Officer for the Platform for International Cooperation for Undocumented Migrants (PICUM) warns, this could translate into intensified internal enforcement.

Obligations to detect undocumented migrants could expand surveillance practices, with critics warning they may increase racial profiling and turn everyday spaces – public transport, social services, and administrative interactions – into sites of migration control.

Recent developments illustrate this trend. France deployed thousands of police officers across transport hubs in June 2025 for large-scale identity controls, Belgium has hardened internal border controls, and Sweden plans to require public agencies to report undocumented residents.

These realities suggest that migration enforcement is moving deeper into ordinary life.  

The political landscape of asylum dramatically overturned  

Bilateral agreements on the return and detention of migrants, for example, between Italy and Libya, have severely limited migrants' access to international protection. So-called "safe-third countries" may not have procedures in place for asylum and may have dubious human rights procedures.  

"Through this practice, the EU is undermining fundamental principles of the international legal order and eroding the concept and possibilities for asylum itself," Santer confirms.  

On 23 February, the EU Council approved a list of seven "safe" countries — Kosovo, Bangladesh, Colombia, India, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco — located outside European borders, authorising a faster asylum procedure, facilitating assessment of expelled cases, and facilitating returns. 

This is part of a wider effort to tighten asylum rules across the continent.  

For Jalali, this regulation would formalise externalisation as a central pillar of the EU return policy, expanding transfers to third countries — including those with which individuals have no prior connection — and authorising cooperation through informal or non-binding agreements.

While outsourcing responsibility beyond European borders, such regulation raises significant accountability concerns, as the EU has limited capacity to ensure respect for human rights standards or provide effective remedies in case of abuse.

He also warns that the proposal could enable cooperation with so-called "non-recognised entities" — like the Taliban in Afghanistan — further complicating and diluting legal responsibility and accountability.  

In this regard, the regulation may not primarily produce deportation, but deportability.

By proliferating return decisions without realistic prospects for enforcement, such migration governance would generate a growing population of the undeserving, trapped in legal limbo — visible enough to be controlled, yet excluded from socio-economic rights and protection. 

Rather than resolving irregular status, the regulation could further institutionalise this situation and risk creating a more permanent regime of exclusion

Political fantasy of mass deportation  

This regulation would represent a significant legal escalation rather than a technical adjustment.

"It would codify practices that were experimental," Carta adds.

While presenting it as an urgent complement to the EU's new Pact on migration and asylum, the EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, warns that the regulation endangers the redefinition of deportation as a central pillar of migration governance rather than a last resort.  

The casual, bureaucratic debate of mass deportations to third countries illustrates how profoundly entrenched this mindset has become. 

While much attention is focused on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States, critics and analysts warn that the European Union may be following a similar pattern.

What is different with the United States is that the EU "often continues to pay lip service to human rights," Santer insists.  

Rooted in anti-migrant racism, migration agendas in both the United Kingdom and the EU seem driven by a single political fantasy: deport as many migrants as possible while instilling fear in wider racialised minorities.

In March 2025, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer celebrated the "hard graft" of mass deportations, while, in October, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggested that Germany's "problem in the cityscape" could only be resolved through "large-scale deportations."  

Marketed in the name of protecting borders and defending nations, such anti-immigration sentiments and mass deportation negotiations, once confined to figures such as Viktor Orbán, have become palatable and commonsensical.

Far-right parties have moved away from Eurosceptic exit plans toward a strategy of institutional capture, using European structures to advance exclusionary agendas.

"Ethno-nationalism and the far-right are on the rise in the EU, and this regulation is clearly influenced by this trend," confirms Santer. 

What all these covers are "the human reality underpinning these systems: behind every return decision is an individual, often in a complex and vulnerable situation. Public discourse tends to abstract migration management into numbers and enforcement metrics, obscuring the human, legal, and practical dimensions involved," Jalali insists.  

Given such a programme, "the EU has given up on any pretence that it upholds the human rights of its migrant and refugee populations," a spokesperson of the Border Violence Monitoring Networks (BVMN) argues.  

With the EU Pact on Migration set to enter into force in June 2026, migration control increasingly operates not only through expulsion but also through the slow suffocation of living conditions: debilitating, confined spaces, minimal care infrastructure, and bureaucratic attrition render everyday life unlivable for migrants.  

The inability to remove the 'other' is likely to fuel political frustration that governments will translate into harsher methods.

When exclusion fails, control hardens — and the target becomes the continued presence of those deemed unwanted. 

Sylvain Henry is a writer based in Samos, Greece, and a recent master's graduate in sociology and political philosophy. He recently worked with the Cyprus Refugee Council