The images of chaos and confusion went global on social media within minutes: an estimated 70,000 Moroccans rushed the shores of Spain’s North African enclave Ceuta, climbing through holes in the chain-link fence and swimming around the barriers jutting into the Mediterranean Sea. In under 48 hours on July 30 and 31, the would-be asylum seekers — mostly young men — had successfully entered Spanish territory; then, just as quickly, they were sent back. More than 80 died, many while attempting to swim the three-mile coastline between the Moroccan town of Fnideq and Ceuta, which has been part of Spain since 1668.
In total, the “crisis” at Ceuta lasted only two days, but in the summer-recessed halls of Europe’s institutions, the story was just beginning. The following Tuesday, Aug. 4, European Home Affairs ministers met in an emergency online meeting , after 22 countries signed a letter of concern. Their goal: respond emphatically and quickly to the dramatic mass movement of migrants seeking to gain access to the European Union’s visa-free travel zone known as Schengen (despite being part of Spanish territory, Ceuta is, contrary to popular belief, not part of the Schengen zone ). In advance of the meeting, two leaders in particular signaled the direction of their support. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, announced it was time to accelerate the development of a vast European deportation system known as “return hubs.” While the contents of the meeting have not yet been made public, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that Meloni hoped to make return hubs the “main course” of the talks.
“We call them ‘European Guantánamos.’”
Return hubs, as envisioned by European politicians since at least 2018 , are asylum processing and deportation centers located in third countries, outside EU jurisdiction. Although they have yet to be formally named, the concept was voted into law over the summer as part of Europe’s massive overhaul of the bloc’s migration policies, known as the Return Regulation. While details of the centers are still lacking — Who will administer them? Who will fund them? — politicians across the bloc are following Meloni and Frederiksen’s lead in pushing for the centers to open by January 2027.
Civil society groups and experts warn that the return hubs are ill-suited to situations like the one that took place in Ceuta. Rather than dealing with the problem at the root, critics say such agreements simply allow leaders to kick the can down the road, subcontracting out responsibility without reducing migratory flows.
“When you cooperate closely with [third-party] countries you’re not just dumping the issue on them, but you’re also giving them leverage to blackmail specific member states and the EU as a whole,” said Davide Colombi, justice and home affairs researcher at the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS).
Estrella Galan, a Spanish member of the European Parliament and former director of a refugee resettlement nonprofit, was stronger yet. “We call them ‘European Guantánamos,’” she said, “because they are financed with our taxes and yet removed from our framework of rights protection.”
“They’re black holes,” she said, “where migrants can remain indefinitely without rights.”
In the Newspeak of European institutions, return hubs are described simply and blandly as “innovative solutions.” Article 17 of the Return Regulation, passed in mid-June, defines return hubs as holding facilities located outside the EU where “illegally staying third-country nationals” subject to return decisions can be transferred before their “onward return to the country of origin or to another country where the third-country national voluntarily decides to return.” According to European officials, return hubs will be reserved for individuals who have already received a deportation order — not migrants whose asylum claims are being processed. Once sent to the centers, migrants, including families with children , can be held for as many as 24 months as they await transfer to their country of origin or a “safe” third country.
Supporters of the policy are quick to note Europe’s low “return rate.” According to estimates, only 28% of individuals with a return notice have been deported. But advocates worry that deported migrants will languish in these centers without oversight. “The idea that you can send someone to a country they have no connection to, to have their case processed there — it fundamentally breaks the link between the person and any legal system that could protect them,” said Silvia Carta, advocacy officer at the Platform for Undocumented Migrants, a European migration nongovernmental organization. “You lose access to lawyers, to courts, to civil society. That’s not an accident — that’s the point.”
Under the regulation, European member states can negotiate transfer agreements with countries that demonstrate a respect for “fundamental rights,” even if the location is not the country of origin of the individuals sent there. And yet, according to Corriere della Sera, Italy plans to push a shortlist of three countries — Rwanda , Uganda and Ghana — that have all been flagged for ongoing human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention, ill treatment and torture, as well as discrimination against minorities and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Other EU countries, meanwhile, have “ zoomed in ” on the same three countries, plus Senegal, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Montenegro and Ethiopia. Many of these countries, most notably Libya and Tunisia, have been also flagged for grave human rights abuses, including torture and family separation.
“You lose access to lawyers, to courts, to civil society.”
None of this has slowed the EU rush to start negotiating bilateral agreements with these potential receiving countries. In April, Austria signed a “mobility agreement” setting the groundwork for a future return hub in Uzbekistan. According to a Reuters report , Greece is in bilateral talks with two African countries about collaborating on return hubs.
In Brussels, policymakers began hammering out the details of EU policy at a series of breakfast meetings in October 2024 . Reuters reported five countries — Denmark, Greece, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany — have taken the lead in coordinating the implementation of the return hubs. Though not formally part of this self-selected organizing committee, Italy has also taken an active role in pushing for the centers.
Once considered fringe, their ideas have steadily gained credibility in European circles. Countries pushing for return hubs, and in particular Austria and Denmark , “used to be the kids on the naughty list, being told off in school,” said Olivia Sundberg, who works on migrant policy for Amnesty International. “Now they’re very much the mainstream.”
Italy has offered Brussels its own expertise in the matter of third-country detention, gained over its two years administering a return hub prototype across the Adriatic Sea in Albania.
The northern Albanian region of Gjadër is an unlikely setting for a massive migrant detention facility. The landscape is rugged and mountainous, with few settlements apart from a smattering of small farming towns and the sprawling shell of a decommissioned Soviet airbase. But in October 2024, Italian and Albanian authorities announced that this former military complex would serve as an offshore asylum-processing center under Italian legal jurisdiction. Asylum claims are processed there, and migrants issued a return order are, in theory, sent back to Italy for deportation.
“There’s a feeling of alienation being there,” said Giorgia Jana Pintus, an advocate who’s visited Gjadër about a dozen times alongside European lawmakers (whose presence is required to access the facility). She described a sprawling, mostly empty facility located in a rural area, far from access to resources. What began as an offshore site for processing asylum claims morphed, over time, into something closer to a return hub — including cases, says Davide Colombi of CEPS, where migrants were deported directly from Albania, bypassing Italy entirely in violation of existing legal norms.
“Albania functioned as a model for the EU,” said Colombi.
Between April and October 2025, 183 migrants were sent to Gjadër, according to an investigation by the Dutch media outlet De Correspondent. Most of them were returned to Italy to be deported, the journalists found; five were deported directly back to their home countries. One of them, Younouse Kone, a 36-year-old Guinean man, told journalists that two of his fellow deportees attempted suicide while in detainment. “There was nothing, and we had no information, not even about our right to apply for asylum,” he said.
Pintus said that the migrants she met at Gjadër did not fit into any one box. “We have met people who were in Italy for 25 years, had families and strong social relationships and work history,” she said, “and some who arrived just six months before.”
“Albania functioned as a model for the EU.”
The price tag for the Italian government has been enormous: an estimated 670 million euros over five years . “It was a huge amount of money for not that many people at all,” Colombi said, citing a University of Bari study that found detention there ran roughly seven times costlier than in an ordinary Italian facility — funded in part by money reallocated from disaster relief, education and healthcare budgets.
Amnesty International’s Sundberg noted that part of the challenge with setting up and standardizing Europe’s return hubs is that no two past attempts at border externalization have been alike. “So much depends on what each government decides to do because the return regulation is not very prescriptive,” she said.
The United States is the third-party deportation pioneer. In 2017, the first Donald Trump administration pursued agreements for deportation of non-nationals to third-countries with the governments of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Though only one of those agreements — with Guatemala — was formally signed, it set the stage for the current administration. According to Third Country Deportation Watch , a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization, the U.S. has signed 35 third-country deportation agreements during Trump’s second term, with countries ranging from the massive Democratic Republic of Congo to the tiny Eswatini, and noted human rights violators like Libya and El Salvador.
The U.S. is not alone. In April 2022, the United Kingdom under then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Rwanda signed a misleadingly worded “Migration and Economic Development Partnership” agreement aimed at facilitating migrant removals. The project was struck down by the U.K. Supreme Court a year and a half later, and no migrants were ever sent to Rwanda.
One of the oldest attempts at third-country deportation involved Australia and Papua New Guinea. The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding known as the “PNG Solution” in August 2013, stipulating that undocumented migrants intercepted by Australia at sea be transferred directly to detention centers on Papua New Guinea for processing and deportation. Australia invested roughly $400 million in aid to help run the camps. Controversy over the program came to a head in 2014 when Iranian asylum seeker Reza Berati was killed and more than 60 others injured in riots after local residents of the island of Manus attacked detainees.
“They wanted to keep us somewhere [where they could] torture [us] and nobody knows,” Benham Satah, a Kurdish Iranian refugee who fled persecution in Iran and who was one of five eyewitnesses of Berati’s murder, told Truthdig. “It was out of sight, out of mind.”
“It was out of sight, out of mind.”
Satah, who now lives in France, spent roughly half a dozen years in the Papua New Guinea detention center. He described the center as “much worse” than Guantánamo, based on his own conversations with former Guantánamo detainees, with conditions that amounted to torture. One detainee, he said, developed septicemia — a form of blood poisoning — and had to have both of his legs amputated. He was medevaced out of Manus, but died in a hospital two days later. Others were regularly denied access to interpretation services and were deported back to countries where their lives were at risk, according to Satah.
The worst part of the detention, he said, was the uncertainty. “Sometimes you commit a crime and go to a judge and they say five years — you know when you’re gonna get out,” he said. “Not knowing when you get out of that hell, that was one of the biggest tortures.”
Though the PNG Solution was discontinued in 2021, a handful of migrants still remain in limbo on the island of Manus. As we spoke, Benham sent me a photo collage of one of the refugees whose release he had been trying to obtain, Haram Yekta. In the image, side by side pictures show the evolution of the young man from a muscular, chiseled and smiling athlete to a frail-looking figure with sunken eyes.
“After 14 years … I would prefer to die at the hands of the mullahs’ regime in Iran, and not suffer all these years of torture by the Australian government,” Satah said, urging European policymakers not to go down the same path.
Have European leaders learned the lessons of the past?
Repeatedly, EU officials have promised that they will avoid the worst abuses of migrant detention facilities elsewhere. “It will be a hub outside of Europe but on European conditions,” Danish PM Frederiksen has said of the centers. The European Commission, in a statement in June, promised “strong safeguards throughout the entire return process.” Article 17 of the Return Regulation itself stipulates that any “agreement or arrangement may only be concluded with a third country where international human rights standards and principles in accordance with international law, including the principle of non-refoulement, are respected.”
Galan, the Spanish member of the European Parliament, told Truthdig that these promises are bunk. “The model repeats patterns we’ve already seen in Donald Trump’s policies,” she said. “Trump’s policies have no filter, but at least he clearly announces that expulsion happens without any guarantees. The European Union disguises it, dresses it up with a veneer of human rights respect when it clearly isn’t one.”
Despite the sense of inevitability that increasingly surrounds the policy, some European leaders are resisting the immediate adoption of return hubs. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called them a “mirage.” And at a June summit in Brussels, French President Emmanuel Macron was withering in his criticism of the policy.
“I don’t know if these are the fundamental principles on which our Europe was built,” he said. “And I have not seen anyone make it work.”
The post EU to Migrants: ‘Go Back to Where You’ve Never Been’ appeared first on Truthdig .
EU to Migrants: ‘Go Back to Where You’ve Never Been’
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at TruthDig.