Last Thursday, the European Parliament voted 389 to 206 to pass the Return Regulation, a sweeping overhaul of E.U. migration enforcement that allows member states to detain asylum seekers for up to two years, and send them to offshore facilities called “return hubs” in countries other than a migrant’s place of origin. Greece, Denmark, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands have already entered into negotiations with several foreign governments, mainly in Africa, to host these sites.
A “return” presupposes a place of origin. These facilities do not.
Despite the inherent controversy of this bill, it passed because the parties of the center-right broke from their own precedent and secretly coordinated with those of the far-right, a political concession to the electoral gains far-right parties have made by running on anti-immigration platforms across Europe. French lawmaker Mélissa Camara, who voted against, called it the moment that the moderate right “sounded the death knell of what remained of the cordon sanitaire.” Swedish Democrat Charlie Weimers celebrated with a social media post: “The era of deportations has begun.”
The regulation now heads into trilogue negotiations between the Parliament, the Council, and the Commission, where member states are pushing for provisions even harsher than what the Parliament has approved, including home raids.
This enforcement architecture is not unfamiliar. In January, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang and the Bavarian branch of Germany’s far-right AfD both proposed dedicated police units for actively locating and deporting undocumented migrants, drawing immediate comparisons to ICE. The European Parliament’s Left co-president, Manon Aubry, warned that accepting the ICE model as part of the political debate meant that the fight was already lost. The Return Regulation passed anyway.
Earlier this year, around 70 NGOs warned that the regulation’s enforcement provisions could authorize police searches of private homes and expand police surveillance on undocumented people across the bloc. The European Commission rejected these comparisons and has since continued drafting the regulation.
Europe’s relationship to the migrant crisis is rooted in colonial partition and the abusive economic arrangements that were written to European advantage following the independence of colonial holdings, generating the economic and political instability which persist today. We cannot separate the flows of people arriving at European borders from the conditions Western powers created and continue to benefit from. The Return Regulation offers no engagement with this history. Offshore detention sidesteps it entirely.
What makes this regulation particularly egregious, however, and worth scrutinizing beyond its stated provisions, is what the cross-border investigation by Voxeurop and Journalismfund Europe, published this week across six countries, found about the detention market. Governments are already awarding migration contracts to private companies with criminal records, routinely bypassing procurement laws in the name of an emergency. Italy awarded a €133 million contract for its Albania offshore detention center to a cooperative with documented connections to the “Mafia Capitale”, a high-profile corruption case involving organized crime. In the U.K., Serco, a private security company, holds a £276 million detention contract despite having previously defrauded the British government. A 2024 medical report on Serco’s Brookhouse facility found that 84 percent of detainees had a history of torture or human trafficking, and three-quarters reported suicidal ideation or attempts.
Oxford criminologist Mary Bosworth describes this as the “logistification” of migration, where people move through a supply chain and where that depoliticization makes government accountability harder to establish. A former employee of Mitie, a private detention company, told Bosworth the work was “an attempt to siphon public resources into private hands by exploiting hatred of migrants,” and that the worst part of his job was “knowing it’s all about shareholder dividends.” The investigation concluded that, across every country examined, administrative failures are rewarded with larger budgets. The crisis is what the system runs on; the United States has already demonstrated that it can work. In 2025, private prison companies generated $2.4 billion from ICE detention alone, and Congress authorized $45 billion for new detention centers.
Europe is building the same market, one with a vested interest in perpetuating the conditions that feed it. And the Return Regulation is a procurement opportunity dressed up as policy.
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