Yesterday, 27 October 2026, the European Commission tabled a new Regulation for Frontex, the EU’s border agency, expanding its powers and refocusing its mandate on deportations, preventing arrivals, and surveillance beyond EU territories and into social media. This would effectively turn Frontex into the EU’s deportation agency, equivalent of ICE in the United States.
At the centre of this reform is a budget that would almost double to nearly €12 billion for 2028–2034, leading to a massive expansion of the EU security and surveillance industrial complex. Frontex will test and deploy new technology to repress migrants, funnelling billions of taxpayer money to surveillance, security and defence contractors. EU’s hostile border security regime has for years produced systemic and massive human rights violations of migrants, refugees and racialised people, and those who stand in solidarity with them. This proposal will accelerate that.
Frontex as an ICE-style deportation enforcement agency
The proposal operationalises the recently adopted Deportations Regulation and deepens Frontex’s position as the central actor of a Europe-wide deportation machine. This will make the agency responsible for collecting and analysing data from Member States in order to “predict” deportation needs, and allocating resources to them. Frontex will now have a “Deportation Coordination Centre” that is expected to act at all stages of the deportation procedure, from detecting and identifying people that may be expulsed, booking or arranging flights and escorts, to monitoring their “reintegration” in the destination country.
Alarmingly, it expands Frontex’s powers to deport outside of the EU’s borders. Based on a simple status agreement, Frontex will be able to deport people from one third country to another, with the aim of preventing people from even reaching the EU. This will likely mean sharing sensitive data with third countries and countries of origin, where individuals may be at risk of persecution or harm.
The Frontex mandate reform comes in a package with a proposal to digitalise the management of deportation cases. The border control agency is given a key role in the harmonised technical design of EU and national digital systems, to exchange data on deportations, including sensitive data transfers to third countries (biometric data, travel documents and history, grounds for deportation, health data, etc.), and automate certain steps of the procedure, such as adding deportation orders in the Schengen Information System (SIS) to detect people.
Increased data processing and content policing
With this reform, Frontex’s practice of “debriefing interviews” is codified, particularly during the screening procedure introduced by the Migration Pact. The agency conducts these covert “voluntary” interrogations of people immediately after they disembark or cross the border. During these interviews, the agency extracts data from migrants deemed to be “suspects” of “cross-border crime”, without the possibility for migrants to seek legal counsel. Debriefing interviews have been rightfully criticised for their absence of fundamental rights monitoring and their unfairness as they take place when a person is detained and lacks privacy.
A new “Online Monitoring and Response Centre” will also surveil social media platforms to identify “suspicious behaviours or trends” in people’s movements at the EU borders, and before that, in the countries of origin and transit. Aggregated data collected online will be fed into Frontex’s “risk analysis” to guide border forces’ deployment and reaction. Social media monitoring was already declared as carrying high-risk for violating the fundamental rights of people affected, and was banned by the European Data Protection Supervisor in 2019 when first implemented by the EU Agency for Asylum.
Frontex will also seek designation as a trusted flagger under the Digital Services Act (DSA), allowing the agency to report pieces of online content to platforms for removal, effectively giving the agency extrajudicial powers to police the internet. It may also recommend national authorities to issue binding take-down notices. Frontex depriving people from finding legal support, sharing their stories or expressing solidarity is undoubtedly a serious infringement of freedom of expression.
All information collected during debriefings and online monitoring activities will contribute to Frontex’s border surveillance intelligence gathering called “European situational picture”. It may be combined with data from EUROSUR, Frontex’s information exchange framework with national border authorities, whose scope has been extended to include personal data in supposedly “exceptional” cases. Very sensitive data such as facial images, age, gender, physical and mental state may be processed to provide “situational awareness in situations posing imminent threat to the integrity of the external borders”. This could mean that individuals can be identified and targeted through cross-checking with OSINT data or AI-based identification tools like facial recognition.
Closer cooperation with Europol to further criminalise migration
Under the pretence of fighting the “facilitation of migration”, Europol, the EU’s policing agency, will be able to routinely consult personal data collected by Frontex. This could lead to individuals involved in border crossings, as survivors or supporters, to mistakenly fall under the investigation of Europol possibly with serious consequences, including impacts on their access to legal stay, detention, deportation or even criminal charges.
Quick Reaction Force for illegal pushbacks
Frontex will now also be able to deploy a “Quick Reaction Force”, to react ”flexibly” to “crisis and emergency situations” at EU borders. In this case, flexibility means outside of the usual controls and safeguards. Rather than coordinating humanitarian responses and triggering the solidarity mechanisms Member States agreed upon in the Migration Pact, the Reaction Force will likely aim to quickly and violently deport and force out people who are arriving to seek protection.
Migration repression becomes a market for arms and tech companies
The reform explicitly gives Frontex powers to research, test, and procure new technologies, including AI-enabled tools, drones, sensors and digital analytics. The agency will now be able to run trials, validate products and then procure them at scale, acting in some cases as a central purchasing body for Member States to pool technical equipment, while supplying non-EU countries with more repressive tools. This will reinforce global business for digital surveillance tech and arms, making migration repression a market of its own. The use of such technologies aims to prevent people from even reaching the EU, further outsourcing EU’s responsibility for border deaths and fundamental rights violations to private security companies and non-EU governments.
Protect Not Surveil says: Defund Frontex and resource care instead
The Commission frames migration as a “hybrid threat”, “instrumentalisation” and “weaponisation”, citing events such as Ceuta in 2026 to justify emergency powers and the expansion of Frontex’s surveillance capacities. This dangerous framing conflates individuals as security threats and removes their agency in their decision to move.
For decades, European governments and the EU have responded to migration not by addressing inequality, conflict, climate change, or the reasons people move, but by expanding a militarised border regime. Europe does not need a deportation agency. It does not need ICE. It needs a different approach to human movement: one that recognises movement as a human reality, protects people’s rights, and invests in safety, solidarity and community rather than deterrence and control.
The choice is between a Europe that responds to challenges through militarisation and exclusion, and one that responds through dignity, care, and shared responsibility.
Chloé Berthélémy, Senior Policy Advisor, EDRi, says, “With the new Frontex reform, the EU seems committed to making its borders even more deadly than they already are for people who come seeking safety and protection. The Commission has given a massive boost to the shady surveillance practices of Frontex by doubling their budget and loosening the already-lax data protection rules. The newly introduced social media surveillance, secret interrogations at borders, AI-powered sensors collecting data in real-time will all equip Fortess Europe for illegal pushbacks, more surveillance, and more misery.”
Pauline Fritz, Research and Advocacy Coordinator at the Border Violence Monitoring Network: “The Frontex regulation announced yesterday shows that impunity pays. Not only is Frontex able to receive new powers and a massive funding boost to expand its border surveillance apparatus, it can do so with full immunity for human rights violations and pushbacks that have and will continue to happen under its watch. It is deeply concerning how far the Commission is prepared to go to stop people from reaching safety and building a life in Europe.”
Sarah Chander, Director of Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice, says, “In the most substantial reform of Frontex to date, the EU transforms the agency into the central operations room for its deportation regime, with broader surveillance powers complemented by a bigger standing army.
Doubling Frontex’s budget to bolster kidnappings, prisons and ICE-like systems comes at a time when Europe’s social systems are failing. The EU is cynically distracting us from the real problems – cost of living, failure of social services and the climate crisis.”
Caterina Rodelli, EU Policy Analyst at Access Now, says “The new Frontex reform builds on years of unchecked privileged relationship between Frontex and the arms and tech companies , as in the case of Frontex Industry Days, which gave the private sector abundant face time to pitch their products and set the Agency’s priorities. Frontex will enable big profits from deadly deportation regime.”
Chiara Catelli, Advocacy Officer at the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, says, “This proposal massively expands Frontex’s powers to track, control and deport undocumented people, from inside the EU to third countries and between third countries, without introducing stronger human rights safeguards. All this for an agency with a track record of allegations of complicity in fundamental rights violations.
Deportation operations and immigration detention centres in the EU are already rife with abuse, and we fear that expanding Frontex’s role will exacerbate these abuses within the EU and extend them beyond its borders. This proposal reflects a political obsession with deportations that ignores the realities of migration and Europe’s own economies.”
Emma Musty, Project Coordinator at I Have Rights, says. “At least 12 lives were lost in two shipwrecks last week and in both cases the Hellenic Coast Guards, who deploy Frontex Assets, were involved. Frontex clearly fails its human rights monitoring obligations when such incidents are so prevalent. We are deeply concerned that Frontex’s Mandate could be expanded, when what is actually needed is adequate search and rescue, accountability and safe routes.”