EU: “Deportation regulation” likely to further criminalise migration and solidarity

In March 2025, the European Commission presented its proposal for a Return Regulation, updating original legislation from 2008.

The proposal expands detentions, deportations, and the EU’s digital surveillance infrastructure, whilst simultaneously legitimising racial profiling by encouraging state-led persecution of migrants (and anyone perceived as such). It includes provisions aimed at expanding the rate of detentions and deportations in the EU, broadening the EU’s increasingly punitive framework on migration, and constructing loopholes for legally disputed “return hubs”. For example, the proposal would make it possible, for the first time, to deport a person against their will to a non-EU country to which they have no personal connection, either through which they have only briefly transited, or in which they have never set foot.

The proposed regulation forms part of longer trajectory of punitive migration policies which increases the securitisation of migration. It follows the adoption of the Migration and Asylum Pact in April 2024, and ongoing negotiations over the Facilitator’s Package (presented in November 2024).

Taken together, it is likely to contribute to the criminalisation of solidarity and migration and create a chilling effect on community support and solidarity. Individuals and organisations offering assistance — including neighbours, faith groups, and civil society organisations — may fear that providing basic humanitarian support could expose them or the people they assist to surveillance, checks, or investigations.

The proposal was issued without a formal human rights impact assessment or formal consultations. In May 2025, an opinion by the European Data Protection Supervisor’s acknowledged the proposal’s impact on the fundamental rights of migrants and recommended “an in-depth fundamental rights impact assessment” and the need for additional safeguards on the data and privacy rights of migrants and their children.

Over 250 civil society organisations have expressed widespread concerns over the “inhumane” regulation, which they have dubbed the “Deportation regulation”.

Several UN experts, including the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, have raised their concerns that the regulation is in violation of international human rights standards and the EU Charter of Fundamental rights and called on EU institutions to urgently amend it.