ROME — The European Union is adopting strict new rules on asylum claims by tightening border controls, speeding deportations, increasing detention times and moving to deploy some of the same clenched-fist tactics as the Trump administration in deterring arrivals.
The White House has accused the 27-nation bloc anchored by Germany, France and Italy of risking “civilization erasure” by allowing unfettered migration. The latest E.U. moves, the most restrictive yet, follow years in which European nations tightened policies in response to hardening public opinion on migration, with new deterrents helping to sharply reduce arrivals.
The new E.U. Pact on Migration and Asylum, which takes hold June 12 will impose even tougher measures — including a proposal that could set the stage for Immigration and Customs Enforcement-like raids; more returns to countries such as Taliban-led Afghanistan; and possible deportations to third nations, similar to the United States’ dispatching of migrants to El Salvador and Equatorial Guinea.
“Today, Europe is changing its approach: no longer relying on ideology-based emergency management, but rather on common rules, border control and shared responsibilities,” Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said.
The increasingly hard-line policies — by countries once seen as a place of refuge for the persecuted and displaced and as a beacon of hope for those seeking a better life — reflect a rising public backlash at a time many Europeans feel beset by their own financial strain.
European officials say they are responding to high numbers of asylum seekers from so-called “safe countries” in South Asia and North Africa, as well as the fatigue of voters after waves of migration, including the arrival of more than 1 million refugees a decade ago, many from the Syrian civil war.
Under a latticework of international treaties and conventions, people fleeing war, famine or other imminent peril to their lives are entitled to request asylum in the first safe country they reach and must be granted protection while their cases are heard.
But European governments have faced loud complaints about a perception — often driven by populist politicians — that too many people not in harm’s way have gained entry, and are now competing for jobs and benefiting from costly social services
For more than a decade, national capitals engaged in finger-pointing at one another and at E.U. officials in Brussels, with frontline counties such as Italy and Greece believing they carried too much of the burden, and interior nations griping that migrants were allowed to flow through.
Right-wing governments in the bloc — including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Italy — are declaring victory in their efforts to bring stricter migration policy to the top of the European agenda.
“This means three very concrete things: quicker procedures, greater European coordination and a finally clear principle we have supported from the get-go: those who are not entitled to international protection must be promptly repatriated,” Piantedosi said.
Tightened national rules have already curbed migration flows. Irregular crossings were down 40 percent in the first three months of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, and followed a 26 percent annual drop in 2025. Asylum applications in February fell to the lowest level since 2020 during the pandemic.
The E.U. is “putting into place the largest reform of our border and migration management system,” said Magnus Brunner, the European commissioner for migration. “And it works.”
“We are taking control of who can enter, who can stay and who must leave the European Union,” Brunner told The Washington Post. “We are bringing our European house in order.”
Critics say the increasingly restrictive policies counter E.U. claims that the bloc is a standard-bearer for human rights. Rights groups say the measures already unfolding, along with those looming, could bring closer to reality the idea of “Fortress Europe” — using ever more restrictive policies to keep non-European refugees out.
“We fear that the overall objective is to restrict access to asylum in Europe,” said Leila Bodeux, senior policy officer on asylum and migration for Caritas Europa, a confederation of Catholic social service providers based in Brussels.
“We feel that many member states and the European Commission, they put this package together to make it more difficult to have access to the normal asylum procedure with all the safeguards linked to it in Europe,” Bodeux said.
The new rules took years to agree upon and were clinched in 2024 to streamline, but also crack down on, how the bloc manages migration.
Brunner maintains that the decisions of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, are “not about left-wing or right-wing politics.” He said they are “about breaking the business model of brutal migrant smugglers and ensuring that those who truly need protection receive it.”
The complex package of rules sets out new screenings to tighten control at the E.U.’s external borders, including collection of biometric data to track migrants across the bloc.
The rules allow for fast-track processing of more asylum applicants, including from countries with low approval rates such as Bangladesh and Tunisia, and will facilitate faster deportations and expand the use of detention to prevent flight. Deportations could also occur before appeals processes are finished, under a pledge that legal entry will be granted if a deported asylum seeker’s case is won.
In the maze of the E.U.’s 27 nations, the regulations may not be easy to apply. They grant permission, for instance, for countries to restrict the movement of asylum seekers to increase still-low deportation rates. But in major border countries like Italy, for instance, national laws limit detention periods without judicial approval.
Rights groups expect more asylum seekers to be denied more quickly and to see more people detained, and for longer periods. They warn that the new system will encourage tech-enabled profiling and arbitrary detention, including of families with children.
The pact is also intended to more evenly share migration pressures with nations at the E.U.’s external borders such as Greece or Spain. In a migration crisis, all member states would have to either accept a certain quota of asylum seekers or provide operational and financial support.
Under pressure from nationalist leaders to take a harder line, the E.U. also is in the final stages of approving a controversial plan that would allow “return hubs” to be set up in countries outside the E.U. That would involve deporting rejected migrants somewhere outside the E.U., to neither the person’s own country nor one they transited through in search of asylum.
The draft text includes a provision, pushed for by some E.U. countries, that would allow national authorities to use “investigative measures” to search homes and other premises suspected of hosting people denied asylum — drawing comparisons by civil society groups to the notorious ICE raids in the United States.
The idea of deportation facilities in third countries, once mainly a priority of the anti-immigrant or anti-Islam hard right, has seeped into the mainstream. As recently as two years ago, E.U. officials criticized a British plan, now defunct, to send asylum seekers to Rwanda as a possible breach of international law.
Those types of arrangements are now being developed. Italy in 2024 set up a return-hub experiment in Albania that was plagued by legal hurdles, but which the new E.U. rules could help jump-start. Austria in May signed a “migration and mobility agreement” with Uzbekistan to facilitate deportations to Afghanistan, a main country of origin for asylum seekers in Europe.
A separate E.U. plan to invite Taliban officials to Brussels to discuss deporting rejected asylum seekers drew backlash from civil society groups and left-leaning lawmakers in recent weeks.
“Europe cannot be converted into a machine of expulsion that negotiates with executioners while bragging about values,” said Iratxe García Pérez, a Spanish member of the European Parliament who heads the Socialists and Democrats faction.
In the Netherlands, the new government recently abandoned a plan to deport rejected asylum seekers to Uganda, following a public outcry over that country’s human rights record, including the death penalty for homosexuality. However, the Dutch are joining forces with Austria, Denmark, Greece, and Germany in pushing to establish facilities in third countries.
Backers say this would speed up the deportation of rejected asylum seekers and avoid hosting them in Europe for extended periods. Proponents argue that the prospect of being dispatched to an offshore holding center might discourage people from attempting an often treacherous journey to the E.U.
The plan has elicited skepticism from Paris and opposition from Madrid. Spain has been an outlier, offering legal status to undocumented migrants.
The location of possible return hubs remains unclear.
Asylum seekers already face more hurdles than applicants who came to the E.U. years ago and call the moves a betrayal.
Faryad Farah, 38, an Iranian musician who said he has participated in protests against the Iranian regime, arrived in Germany last year with a fake passport, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his younger brother, who received asylum there seven years ago.
Instead, Farah faced a period of detention at a Frankfurt airport holding facility, followed by placement in a nearby refugee holding center where his movements are limited. A year later, he has yet to win asylum. He fears the deportation facilities mean asylum seekers could end up in strange, potentially unsafe countries.
Farah called the Trump administration’s openly hostile position against migrants more honest than that of the Europeans — who are curbing migration while still casting themselves as champions of human rights.
“Honestly, it’s all fake here,” he said in a phone interview. “I prefer the U.S. policy against the refugees, because when you say you want to deport all of them, it shows that you are hundred percent sure about your policy. Here, they try to have it [both ways].”
Francis reported from Brussels. Beatriz Ríos in Brussels contributed to this report.
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