27 April 2025- Abolish Frontex, a grassroots network of organisations and groups working to end the EU border regime, calls for actions on and around World Refugee Day (Friday, 20 June 2025). While the EU keeps expanding its border infrastructure and increases deportations with the growing involvement of Frontex, which is directly funded by the European Commission, the lives and rights of people on the move are under constant attack. We need to keep protesting and resisting.
Frontex has become an important actor in deportations in recent years and can now even initiate deportation flights by itself. The agency is involved in forced returns of tens of thousands of people on the move every year, and tries to intervene earlier in the asylum process to steer people towards ‘voluntary’ returns.
In March the European Commission launced new proposals to increase the number of deportations, prolong the possible length of detention and create EU ‘return hubs’, detention centers in non-EU-countries for jailing people who were denied the right to stay.
European press and policitians are quick to denounce new anti-migration policies from the Trump administration, but fail to see that the EU is steadily heading down the same road. This includes efforts to deport people, in particular Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists, for political reasons.
Frontex also plays a significant role in EU border externalisation efforts, with operations in five non-EU-countries (Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia) and other forms of cooperation with many more. Despite proven massive human rights abuses by Libyan militias, Frontex continues to share the position of migrant boats with Libya, effectively enabling crimes against humanity in detention camps where people are imprisoned. Meanwhile, at the end of March Italy and Libya concluded a new agreement for the training of Libyan pilots to ‘combat irregular migration’.
Despite Frontex’s dismal track record, the EU Commission proposed to increase the agency’s staff to 30,000, as part of plans to strengthen EU law enforcement agencies across the board. Over the last year Frontex spent hundreds of millions of euros on buying or leasing aircraft, drones and other equipment for border surveillance with from arms companies such as Airbus and Leonardo. Frontex’s drone surveillance flight hours over the Mediterranean have increased severely. Strengthening border security pushes people on the move to more dangerous routes. As a result, last year, over 2,200 people died in the Mediterranean, and many more went missing trying to reach the Canary Islands.
This all is part of the ever-growing border security and deportation infrastructure of Fortress Europe. The implementation of the Pact on Migration and Asylum leads to a further erosion of the rights of people on the move, notably the right to ask for asylum, and more loss of lives at the borders. Pushbacks, a completely illegal action, continue to happen and are increasingly normalised, endangering lives and making a mockery of any notion of EU as a promotor and protector of human rights and guarantor of treaties. While Frontex Director Leijtens continues his media campaign of ‘whitewashing’ the agency, in reality its complicity in human rights violations continues undisturbed.
EU President von der Leyen recently announced that a proposal for a new Frontex regulation will be on the agenda for next year, which will strengthen Frontex’s role in border security and deportations, and include a mandate to organise deportations directly with third countries.
Meanwhile the EU and its member states have entered an era of militarisation, wasting hundreds of billions of euros on rapidly increasing military budgets, building a war apparatus, supporting the arms industry, undermining arms export controls, pushing aside climate change measures and cutting budgets for education, healthcare, social security and development cooperation. This puts security for everyone at risk, and fuels reasons that force people to flee across the globe.
For World Refugee Day 2025, we invite you and your local groups to organise an action against Frontex and the EU’s murderous border regime. Please inform us if something may happen in your city on this occasion by sending an email to info[at]abolishfrontex.org so that we can integrate it in our media work.
