by Victoria Salazar
We have long warned that the European project operates on an insidious, colonial grammar. Following the warning signs of March 9, that grammar was codified into brutal, undeniable law during the plenary vote on March 26.
Following a hurried committee session earlier this month, the full European Parliament has now officially endorsed the new “Return Regulation”, a sterile bureaucratic term for what is, in reality, a draconian Deportation Regulation. By a plenary vote of 389 in favour, 206 against, and 32 abstentions, the parliament greenlit the most sweeping, violent rollback of migrant rights in recent European history. As Amnesty International rightly condemned,this agreement was rushed through negotiations without adequate scrutiny or meaningful human rights assessments. But what is perhaps most revealing is how this happened. The “centrist” European People’s Party (EPP) openly abandoned the facade of democratic moderation, forging a deliberate voting alliance with far-right groups to override the original text and push through an extreme, ultra-punitive compromise.
The mask of institutional neutrality has fully slipped.
This vote is not about “migration management.” It is an exercise in racialised class warfare, patriarchal control, and state-sanctioned violence. As the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) rightfully articulated in their immediate response to the initial vote, this regulation functions as “Today’s Jim Crow”, using ostensibly neutral administrative law to build a system of racial hierarchy and systematic removal. By criminalising our presence and fast-tracking deportations, this legislation systematically targets the community infrastructures, care networks, and family units that marginalised genders fight so fiercely to hold together.
Let us examine the mechanics of this legislation. The text explicitly approves the creation of extraterritorial “return hubs”, legal black holes outside the EU where rejected asylum seekers, including families and children, can be warehoused in countries they have never even set foot in. This is the spatial externalisation of border violence, a classic colonial strategy. Europe, having historically extracted wealth, resources, and labour from the Global Majority, now uses its accumulated capital to bribe third countries into functioning as offshore prisons for the very bodies its imperial history has displaced. It expands the fiction of the “safe third country,” allowing the state to deport youth with lived migration experiences to nations they have absolutely no connection to, erasing their histories and severing their ties.
Furthermore, the regulation weaponises the legal system against the most marginalised people. It sanctions the administrative detention of returnees for up to 24 months, two years of stolen life, simply for the “crime” of seeking survival.It authorises police to search and seize the meager personal belongings of non-EU nationals. It imposes lifelong entry bans. When the text removes access to basic services for those whose deportation is inevitably postponed, it engages in a capitalist logic of exhaustion: if the European market cannot currently exploit your precarious labour, the state will legally engineer your destitution until you simply disappear. We are witnessing the deliberate“ICE-ification” of Europe’s migration policy, shifting away from management towards pure policing and coercion. The regulation could even allow for the sharing of medical data across authorities for deportation purposes, forcing people to abandon necessary healthcare out of fear, and introduces a cruel “cooperation trap” that sanctions vulnerable, non-removable individuals failing to facilitate their own impossible expulsions.
This is governance as border maintenance, where the border follows racialised bodies into the very heart of society. Europe desires migrants as an exploitable underclass to sustain its economies, yet pathologises and criminalises us the moment we demand agency, safety, or political existence.
The March 9 committee vote was merely a grim precursor to the March 26 plenary disaster. It demonstrates that the political centre in Europe is more than willing to adopt the violent fantasies of the far-right to maintain the continent’s hierarchies.
But as we stated in our recently launched Manifesto, beneath this machinery of bureaucratic precarity, something else has taken root. Youth with lived migration experiences are not mere passive subjects of these draconian policies; we are the architects of a resistance that outlives their election cycles. We have woven intersectional infrastructures of mutual aid where the state has intentionally targeted us.
This legislation must be fought, and our horizon extends beyond the halls of Strasbourg. True transformation does not trickle down from the benevolence of the EPP or the LIBE committee. It happens when we actively dismantle the colonial systems in favour of solidarity and co-liberation. Our presence in Europe is not a crisis; it is the living consequence of colonial histories, and our solidarity cannot be contained by their offshore return hubs or their 24-month detention quotas.
We will not be governed by fear. We will continue to build a Europe rooted in co-liberation, justice, and the uncompromising abolition of border violence.
Until that world exists, we will continue to fight.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect VOICIFY’s views
