More than seventy human rights organisations from across Europe warn that Commission’s plan to increase deportations of people with no legal right to stay in the EU risks normalising immigration raids and surveillance measures of ’ICE style’. The draft regulation will be voted on by Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties in March.
In 2025, the European Commission published a proposal to increase deportations of people who have no legal right to stay in the EU. That includes potentially sending such persons to offshore centres in non-EU countries. Council finalised its position on such law in December 2025 citing return hubs in third countries, unspecified ’special measures’ and detention in prison.
ICE criticism ’hypocrisy’
In a joint statement, 75 human right organizations call the plan “a punitive system, fuelled by far-right rhetoric and based on racialised suspicion, denunciation, detention and deportation.” The text cites the sweeping nature of the proposed measures, with plans to allow police to search private homes for undocumented people without a judicial order, as well as ’other relevant premises’.
We can not be outraged by ICE in the United States while also supporting similar practices in Europe. – Michele LeVoy, Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants
“The result could be ICE-like raids in private homes as well as public spaces and workplaces,” said Michele LeVoy from the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants. Thus, she pointed out the similarity with anti-immigration raids in the United States conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) units. “We can not be outraged by ICE in the United States while also supporting similar practices in Europe,” Ms LeVoy underlined.
In the end of January, United Nations’ rights experts sent a letter to the European Union criticizing the deportations plan. The document lists more than a dozen concerns over how the plans could contravene international human rights obligations. It also questiones the EU’s motives. “We are concerned that the proposed regulation may, in part, have been motivated by stigmatising migrants for certain homegrown social problems, wrongly suggesting that removing migrants would solve these problems,” the letter reads.
One in five illegal migrants returned
Commission defends the plan as “effective and modern procedures” that aims at increasing the deportations of people denied asylum or who had overstayed their visa. Only one in five people without the right to stay in the EU are returned to their country of origin. These figures have changed little in recent years.
The latest report published by European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) show that illegal border crossings into the EU keep declining. In 2025, the number of detected irregular migrants fell by 26 per cent (compared to previous year) to some 178,000. That it is the lowest figure recorded since 2021, according to Frontex. The Central Mediterranean remains the most active migration route into the EU.
