Five European countries follow US with third-country expulsion plans as EU approves migrant ‘return centers’

Five European Union countries are moving forward with plans to begin expelling asylum seekers whose applications are rejected to third countries outside the bloc, potentially in Africa, after the EU this week approved new rules paving the way for the practice.

Greece, Germany, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands have agreed on a common framework to establish “return centers” outside the EU to which people who have exhausted legal possibilities to stay in Europe could be transferred if they cannot be returned to their own country of origin.

“As far as the return centers are concerned, things are progressing very well,” Danish Interior Minister Morten Bødskov told reporters on Thursday, according to AFP. “We are moving in the right direction.”

He previously said Denmark hoped to “be ready to transfer the first irregular migrants to a partner country outside the EU by 2027”.

Greek Migration Minister Thanos Plevris told Politico that Greece hopes to set up a pilot project in the first half of next year.

No potential destinations for the EU return centers have been confirmed, although Rwanda has been flagged as a possible partner in the project. A Greek government statement regarding the plans said the hubs would be established in safe third countries, “in particular on the African continent.”

The EU itself has presented the idea of ​​return centers as a potential deterrent against irregular immigration. A discussion paper published by the EU’s European Council in October 2025 said the centers could “encourage voluntary returns” because migrants who fail to comply with an expulsion order could be transferred to a center.

The policy could also discourage people without valid asylum claims from undertaking dangerous journeys to Europe.

Rules adopted this week by the EU establish a legal framework for bloc-wide returns and allow member states to enter into bilateral or unilateral agreements with countries outside the bloc, but with stipulations.

According to these rules, “any such agreement or arrangement may only be concluded with a third country that respects international human rights standards and the principles of international law, including the principle of non-refoulement,” which ensures that no individual may be returned to a country where they would be exposed to torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, punishment or other irreparable harm.

The EU follows the examples of the United States and the United Kingdom

The Trump administration has enthusiastically embraced the use of third-country deportations to remove undocumented migrants from the United States. More than 100 deportees were sent to eight African countries over a 10-day period in August, according to internal U.S. government documents. obtained by CBS News.

The deportees were sent to destinations including the African countries of Liberia, Rwanda, Eswatini and Sierra Leone.

Plevris, the Greek migration minister, welcomed the Trump administration’s approach.

“I’m a fan of President Trump,” he told Breitbart in August. “But if you ask me what was the best thing he did, it was to change the migration policy of the United States, because now we also have a new migration policy in Europe.”

Other European governments have already experimented with expulsions to third countries, but with mixed results.

“No shortcut to circumvent the difficult aspects of migration policy”

The former British Conservative Party government sought to send asylum seekers arriving by irregular routes to Rwanda to have their applications processed. The UK Supreme Court ruled the scheme illegal in 2023, before it was even implemented, due to the risk that refugees could ultimately be returned to countries where they were persecuted.

The following year this policy was officially abandoned by the new Labor Party government after the Conservatives were driven from power. Britain’s Home Office said £715 million (nearly $950 million) had been spent on the Rwanda program by June 2024 and that no asylum seekers had been forcibly relocated. Four people voluntarily went to Rwanda as part of this program.

“One lesson might be that European governments should expect litigation, even when the third country seems considerably less controversial than Rwanda,” Peter Walsh, a senior fellow at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, told CBS News on Friday.

“These policies are often justified as deterrents, and that assumes that a large enough proportion of people believe there is a realistic chance that they will actually be transferred,” Walsh said. “If only a very small proportion can be moved, the deterrent effect is likely to be much less credible.”

“The broader lesson from Rwanda is that outsourcing is not a shortcut to circumvent difficult aspects of migration policy,” he said. “It may shift some of these challenges geographically, but governments still have to deal with courts, individual rights, administrative capacity, countries that may not cooperate on returns, and significant costs. »

The push for return centers is part of a broader effort by European countries to tighten their immigration policies amid intense pressure on governments to increase the number of people without legal right to stay who are actually deported.

Jacob Reynolds, policy director at Freedom and Sovereignty Initiative Europe, a right-wing think tank based in Brussels, called the EU’s decision to adopt the poles “a welcome step towards taking control of our borders and expelling those who have no right to be here.”

But he added that “outsourcing the problem of illegal immigration to third countries – as the EU has long done – risks avoiding the wider problem: the lack of control over EU countries’ borders.”

He called for “much more fundamental action” to tackle the “generous schemes available to asylum seekers in Europe”, and said that until this happened “the problem will not be solved”.