Why we are speaking about Deaths, Detention, and Returns now

I. The Unexamined Border

As an organisation, we rarely stop to explain why we focus on the issues that we do. In a human rights landscape crowded with escalating crises, attention moves quickly and we are increasingly expected to move with it. Attention follows emergencies. Our supporters, our funders and the media tend to follow where the most high profile concerns are arising. And organisations like Collective Aid, so frequently under pressure to respond, can benefit from taking the time to pause a while and articulate the longer view: to explain not just what it is we are doing, but why we have chosen to direct our advocacy, our voices, our energy, toward certain issues over others.

This piece is a touch different from our regular blogs. It is not a report on our programmes, nor an appeal about a specific issue area, nor a summary of field activities. It is, instead, a gentle attempt to step back for a time and explain our thinking. We are often praised for naming the pattern the we track, but we have not taken enough time to clarify to you, our audience, why Collective Aid's advocacy  over the past year has centred so insistently on three interconnected fronts: deaths and missing persons, detention at Europe's borders, and so-called voluntary (and involuntary) returns.

Our focus areas are not arbitrary choices. They are the issues that we feel most clearly reveal how Europe's border system is currently functioning: no longer as a site of humanitarian failure as it has been labelled until now, but more as a site of deliberate design. And, most importantly, they are the issues that the people we work to support are most concerned about. 

Across Europe's borders, in the areas we work and in the areas where we support civil society: people continue to die and disappear at alarming rates. Detention centres have expanded under the disguise of euphemisms about "safety" and "screening." Deportations have been rebranded as "voluntary returns." Each of these trends, viewed in isolation, can appear technical: a matter of policy, logistics, or legal nuance. Our analysis is that together, they reveal something deeper: a future vision for Europe that accepts human disposability.

II. The Logic of Disposability

The crisis of Europe's border regime is no longer simple untrammeled violence as much as it is the cold efficiency and legality that now upholds the violence. As time goes on, weakening attention on human rights and civil liberties has given ground to policy and precedent that normalises, reproduces and defends violence against displaced people.

Across detention sites, registration and reception centres, pushback operations, and return flights, one principle repeats itself: some lives can and should be managed away. The children who drown in the Aegean, the family who disappear into detention sites, the people "voluntarily" returned to a country they fled: all disappear into policy language that is designed to make their loss administratively acceptable or at worst “regrettable.”

As our research and investigations have expanded and our ability to engage with civil servants and policy makers has also expanded, we have increasingly heard extensive arguments specifying that a pragmatic pathway must be found to "manage illegal migration," "reducing irregular crossings and national security threats," "streamline returns for those who volunteer." Each pragmatic appeal reduces the humanity of the people we are discussing. Each redefinition moves the moral line further from view. In this way, the borders of Europe are over time becoming less defended by physical barriers and walls and are increasingly being defended through a system of forgetting: a system that erases people politically and symbolically in order to justify their physical removal.

Disposability is no longer a side effect. It is the organising logic of local, national and international policy. It determines who gets rescued and who is left to drown. Who will be detained and who will be waved through. Who can expect to be deported and who can be allowed to overstay. It is not new to observe that those determinations are deliberate. The structures that determine disposability according to race, class, gender, nationality and beyond are deeply rooted global hierarchies. What we observe however, is that decisions and determinations, as a matter of policy, are now being decided long before anyone reaches a border: as attitudes and definitions of migration shift, and who is considered disposable.

The humanitarian sector will always remain willing to name this and that is why we feel we must discuss these realities directly and clearly now. Not as theory, but as the observable structure of policy and practice. Borders do what they are built to do. They do not protect people, they sort them: into those who can be absorbed and those who must be expelled, detained, deterred, or disappeared.

III. Deaths and Disappearances

Nowhere is that logic more bluntly visible than in the escalating numbers of deaths and disappearances that occur along Europe's borders. The numbers are staggering, yet profoundly incomplete. Since 2014, more than 30,000 people are known to have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean alone. Thousands more have perished on land routes through the Balkans, the Sahara, and at border crossings across the continent. And countless others remain unrecorded: their bodies never recovered, their names never known, their families left without answers or graves.

The officials, civil servants and diplomats call these numbers “unfortunate”, sometimes perhaps even "tragic." But tragedy implies a venomous assumption of inevitability, as if these deaths were beyond human control. They are not. Each death that has taken place across Europe’s borders in the time we have been operational, has been a predictable and intended outcome of policies that increasingly criminalise support, externalise asylum, and build deterrence into geography itself.

Even where European governments and the EU will pay Libyan and Turkish forces to physically intimidate and prevent people from reaching EU waters: the evidence has found that migration is not deterred. Such criminalised practices simply push it into darker criminal channels: onto more dangerous routes, into the hands of smugglers and traffickers, across seas where rescue has been administratively dismantled. The deaths that follow are not accidental. They are engineered by a system that prefers the idea of death at a distance than the idea of arrival at the shore.

While solidarity and support operations have been systematically criminalised: escalating regimes of surveillance and monitoring have increased law enforcement awareness in real time, watching as boats capsize, people drown or die of exposure but refusing to intervene. The technology, the will and the money exists to save lives. But while the political will does not, people will die while being observed. This is not a gap in capacity. It is a gap in care. Deaths are typically logged and reported as "incidents,” with lives translated into data points: in some cases unverified, pending, inconclusive. The moral vocabulary of bureaucracy flattens the meaning of the loss as families are in many cases left to search on their own, scrolling through lists, calling embassies and reception centres across countries, waiting and not knowing if they are searching for a living person or a body, and in too many cases finding no answers.

To count the dead is not enough. To name them, to remember them, to insist that disappearance itself is violence: this is the beginning of what is necessary and that is why we speak about this issue. What is uncounted and unreported remains unaccountable and such deliberate forgetting of people and their disposal at Europe’s borders cannot become routine.

IV. Detention

The second pillar of concern is detention. In camps, reception centres, and closed-control access centres across Europe and along its external borders, the architecture of containment has become the architecture of governance.

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, finalised in 2024, massively expanded detention capacity under the guise of "accelerated procedures" and "border screening." People arriving at European borders can now expect to be detained for up to twelve weeks, without having committed any crime, without posing any danger, simply because they arrived seeking asylum. Detention is no longer exceptional. It is the default response to human movement.

Inside detention centres, the language shifts again. Confinement is now "reception." Isolation is now "processing." Controlled access has become "security." The human beings in the system are becoming files awaiting decision. The system operates smoothly only when the person inside it is decided to not be a threat or subject of concern. Detention is typically presented as temporary, as procedural, as necessary for processing. But for many, it stretches indefinitely. Families are separated. Children, even infants, have been held in facilities designed for adults, their development suspended in legal and bureaucratic limbo. People wait for interviews that are delayed and decisions that never come: for a future that European officials have decided to be indefinitely suspended.

The conditions inside detention centres tend to vary by location, but the logic does not. Whether a site is called a detention facility, a reception centre, or a screening facility, the function is generally the same: to contain people long enough that they give up, agree to return "voluntarily," or become so legally entangled that deportation becomes easier.

The role that technology plays in accelerating this also cannot be ignored. Biometric databases increasingly track movements across borders, turn people into data points and follow them long after they leave detention. Fingerprints taken at one border now reappear across law enforcement databases, not for the purposes of protection but for control. As AI is increasingly used across these systems also, there is also a system of surveillance and sorting that removes human judgement: making detention faster, more efficient and potentially more total. None of these technologies make the system fairer or more accountable, only more precise and cost-efficient.

To detain someone for seeking safety is to criminalise need: to turn the act of arrival into evidence of a person's guilt. And it reveals the truth that Europe will simply contain what it cannot or does not plan to welcome. In this regard, detention centres are not failures of the system, only the system working exactly as intended. 

V. Returns

Finally, returns. Few terms are more misleading or misunderstood than "voluntary return." On paper, it suggests choice, informed consent and agency. In practice, it is often the endpoint of exhaustion: a person’s consent extracted not through persuasion but through attrition.

The EU and its member states are increasingly investing in "Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration" (AVRR) programmes across the continent and in countries of origin and transit, claiming they offer people the opportunity to return home with support and dignity. The language is always exceptionally soft: "assisted," "voluntary," "reintegration." But dignity built on coercion is a fiction. A person risks their life to reach Europe. They endure detention often on their journey, likely denial of asylum at one or more points, and are cut off from the right to work, to housing, to any form of legal stability at various different stages. Then they are offered two options: remain in legal limbo, often financially destitute with no means of getting a job, or accept a plane ticket and a small cash payment to return to the country they fled. This is called voluntary. But there is no freedom in a choice made under duress.

Deportation flights leave European airports weekly, sometimes daily. Many are charter flights, filled with dozens or hundreds of people being removed against their will. The logical outcome of a system that treats people as problems to be solved through expulsion.

Returns complete the cycle of disposability. They close the loop from deterrence to disappearance, confirming the system's success in erasing those it deems unmanageable. A person survives the crossing, survives detention, and is sent back to the country they fled, sometimes to imprisonment, sometimes to further persecution, sometimes to their death. The border's work is done. The person has been removed, and Europe can claim its system is functioning.

The system can congratulate itself for the gentleness of its administrative expulsion. The language of humanitarianism is repurposed to mask the violence of removal and international aid organisations, sometimes unwittingly, become part of the deportation apparatus, facilitating voluntary returns, offering "reintegration support" and helping people to leave. The system makes itself legible as care, when what it is doing is elimination and often humiliation..

We are determined to see through the euphemism. Returns are not solutions, and they are not dignified exits. They are the endgame of a fault-ridden border policy: once again proof that the system works not by protecting people, but by making them go away.

VI. How These Issues Connect

What links deaths, detention, and returns is not coincidence. It is design. And running through all three is a set of interlocking logics that currently determine who Europe treats as human or as manageable surplus.

Race is the thread that holds the system together. Europe’s borders do not operate neutrally because they were built to divide between the accepted mobile and the unaccepted immobile: the welcomed and the excluded. And those divisions map almost perfectly onto colonial attitudes and present-day hierarchies of global power. It is racialised people who are dying at higher rates today on Europe’s borders. It is racialised people who are detained at higher rates because their presence is coded as threat. And it is racialised people who are disproportionately deported because their claims to protection are deemed less credible and their lives less grievable.

This is not accidental. It is European border policy doing what it is designed to do. The language of "migration management" allows for enforcement without ever engaging with issues of race or ethnicity directly because these are policies concerned with "countries of origin," "security risk," "integration capacity", not with the outcomes that they create: a Europe in which some people belong, and some do not, and that determination is racial.

Gender, too, circulates through every stage of this system. Women experience borders differently to men, but that fact is rarely centered in the discourse, especially at a policy level. Women are killed, detained, and deported, but the specific violence they face and the trauma they experience is so often treated as secondary or contextually specific. For those women who make it, they are typically required to explain why they should not be deported back to contexts of gender-based violence, with their claims treated most often as insufficient or even hysterical. At every point, the system renders women and their experiences invisible or illegitimate, even as it subjects them to compounded harm.

Finally, class operates across these areas of concern quietly but decisively. Wealth determines whether one needs to make a journey across Europe’s borders and it determines how that journey will go for you. It can be the difference between being able to pay a fine, hire a lawyer or face deportation. It can be the difference between whether your stay is welcome or criminalised. In this regard, the border is not a wall that divides all people equally and that is reflected in the distribution of deaths, detentions and returns of different peoples. All of these dynamics are sorting mechanisms that continue to privilege the rich coming to Europe and very actively punish the poor who come to Europe: ensuring that only those with acceptable wealth can move freely while those without are stopped, detained, and expelled.

It is these exact dynamics that compel us to specify that we are witnessing the success of a system that is entirely anti-humanitarian from beginning to end. The policies behind escalating border deaths, detentions and returns are determining with brutal clarity, whose lives matter and whose do not. Whose deaths will be mourned and whose will be filed away. Whose freedom will be protected and whose will be contained. Whose presence will be tolerated and whose will be asked to leave.

VII. The role of advocacy 

For us, talking about these issues and doing the associated advocacy is not a public relations exercise. It is not about brand positioning or thought leadership or sector visibility. It is an act of telling the truth we see every day. Our focus on these issues: deaths, detention, returns, came directly from the people and communities we work alongside. The stories we hear from the people we talk to are what shape our priorities. Their experiences inform our analysis. Their requests guide our voice. 

We call this needs-assessed advocacy: not doing advocacy on behalf of people, but working towards a method of advocacy led by them, accountable to them, grounded in their lived realities rather than our institutional assumptions.

To advocate is to bear witness. To transform proximity into accountability. To insist that what we see should not be left unseen, and that seeing obligates us to speak. It should not be political to identify that we are routinely observing the results of policy that treats people as disposable. To do anything less would mean we only soften the edges of systems that are ultimately not fit for purpose.

This is not comfortable work. Doing advocacy this way brings friction and pressure from governments, law enforcement, funders, even some partners. Parts of the humanitarian sector that prefer quieter approaches. But comfort is not the measure of integrity and it is not the measure of correct decisions. The measure is whether we are willing to name what we say we are here to do and change the situation we see. Clearly, publicly, and without retreat.

VIII. What We All Owe

Europe’s borders, as they exist today, are a choice. So is silence.

European migration policy is not merely a policy problem. It is a collection of decisions that have already been made regarding whose lives we can deign to accept into our borders and whose lives are expendable. They are declarations about which deaths matter to us and which do not. Systems that sort human beings into categories of value and impose those categories with lethal force.

To speak about deaths, detention, and returns is to insist that none of this is inevitable and that all of this is, actually, really not good enough. The work of organisations like ours must not end at alleviation, but must reach toward naming the structures that agitate the very problems we are alleviating.

At Collective Aid, we refuse to forget. We refuse to let disappearance be the measure of order. We refuse to accept that deaths at borders are tragic but unavoidable, that detention is unfortunate but necessary, that returns are voluntary when people have no real choice. We must speak about these problems now because it is our responsibility now that these problems are addressed plainly. 

This is why we focus on the issues we do. Not because they are easy, or fundable, or politically viable. The violence has never been clearer and the logic is totally exposed now. The people we work with have told us that this is what needs to be said. And so we say it.

Words by Noah Hatchwell, the CEO of Collective Aid