If you would like to share the newsletter with your contacts, they can sign up here to receive future briefings.

Content warning: This briefing may contain references and links to descriptions of abuse, torture, and racial and gendered violence at borders. 

AT A GLANCE

• US/West Asia: The US, after an impressive two-month streak without bombing anyone, has triggered a regional war with a chaotic attempt at regime change in Iran, with hundreds killed and around a dozen countries affected at the time of writing. There is lots to say about the conflagration which is beyond the scope of this brief. From a migration perspective, short-term mostly internal displacement is rocketing regionwide (notably in Lebanon) and many of those with access to evacuation options (such as well-off immigrants in the Gulf) are availing themselves of these. Potential scenarios of large-scale displacement from a destabilised Iran loom large, in yet another coup for the “anti-immigration” US administration as it also tightens the noose around Cuba, risking another exodus. Other countries are already preparing to block potential movement; Greece has suspended Iranian asylum claims. It’s very difficult to predict how this ends, but given the historical record for attempts at regime change by airstrike, the chances are: not well for anyone involved except arms companies. 

• UK: As prime minister Keir Starmer followed Trump into war, he was also reeling from a shock by-election defeat in the Manchester suburb of Gorton and Denton, to a reinvigorated Green Party. Hard-right Reform came second, reducing the Labour government to a distant third in a seat it held for nearly a century. This may feel a somewhat provincial story to non-British readers, but with the Greens and Reform now topping national polls, it signals a significant realignment away from orthodoxy - even in a country with an electoral system favouring the traditional parties. Migration is key to this realignment; in Gorton and Denton, Reform ran anti-immigration activist Matt Goodwin whilst the Greens ran local councillor and party migration and refugee support spokesperson Hannah Spencer. One might imagine Labour rethinking the merits of its anti-immigration course, but days later, home secretary Shabana Mahmood forged ahead with abolishing permanent refugee resettlement, alongside plans which penalise people from migrant families claiming state support. 

BORDER EXTERNALISATION

• Central Mediterranean: Early 2026 is the most lethal start to the year on record for people crossing on the central Mediterranean route, with an estimated 600 deaths so far. Tragedies have been compounded by climate change-linked extreme weather, but also an Italian and European policy blitz which is making the environment more hostile - from a painfully low baseline. Italy’s government has been aggressively detaining rescue ships for failing to cooperate sufficiently with Libyan authorities (who have a habit of opening fire at them) whilst slamming judges who have upheld rulings against its anti-rescue campaign. It is also steering legislation that would allow naval blockades in the sea, whilst, assisted by the EU, it is helping the unrecognised Eastern Libyan government to set up its own “rescue” coordination centre (that word doesn’t mean what you think it does), and increasing cooperation with a notorious warlord. One recent EU paper also suggested direct post-rescue deportations to Libya.

• Europe: The deteriorating Mediterranean situation occurs against the backdrop of a wider European offensive of migration outsourcing. The EU took significant steps toward facilitating offshore centres for people seeking asylum, as centre- and far-right European Parliament members allied in a vote to allow the deportation of people to places they have no link to. The Parliament also approved a new list of safe* countries (*your experience may vary) including Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Kosovo, India, Morocco, and Tunisia. 

• Italy/Albania: The Parliament’s move effectively underwrites Italy’s scandal-wracked deal with Albania, as a sharp increase in forced transfers from Italian detention centres to Albania took place last month, despite ongoing court cases. The Netherlands’ De Correspondent has a detailed investigation on the human and financial costs, the legal loopholes and violations involved in launching the deal, and its possible wider consequences, whilst a recent academic paper provides further historical context.  

• Libya: Libyan authorities claim to have detained over 2000 people migrating in a series of dawn raids after demolishing their homes. The raids took place in Sebha, southern Libya, where numerous cases of violence against migrants have been documented, and came amid an escalating deportations campaign. 

• US: A US federal judge has ruled that rapid deportation of people to countries other than their own violates due process. The cost of third country deportations is skyrocketing - the administration has spent more than $1m per person on these operations according to a new congressional investigation. Oh well, it’s not as if there’s anything else Americans’ money could be better spent on. 

• Deutsche Welle has a report on mixed opinions in Ghana about the country’s role in the US externalised deportation regime.  

DETENTION, DEPORTATION AND BORDER VIOLENCE

• World: As news broke that nearly 7,667 people went missing or died on migration routes worldwide last year. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged countries to reject fear-driven narratives on migration, stressing that "migration is not a crisis" and calling for stronger international cooperation to manage human mobility. On the other side US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s keynote speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference focused on “mass immigration” as an existential security threat while heralding a new era of Western prestige and dominance, which from what we can tell seems to be working out great so far. 

• US: The Trump administration has given ICE broader powers to detain people who entered the US legally but have not yet received status. The US also began arresting people who crossed the new militarised area at the Mexican border on trespassing charges last month. These moves come as a surge of lawsuits emerges in responses to ICE’s aggressive enforcement actions, notably in Minneapolis. (The government can simply choose to ignore the courts - it recently deported a person who courts had ordered returned to their US home.) The Department of Justice has also opened a criminal probe to investigate ICE officers who shot a Venezuelan man. Meanwhile, ICE arrests and detention numbers have dropped again. 

• A blind Rohingya refugee was found dead on the frozen streets of Buffalo, New York, after immigration authorities released him miles from home, alone at night.

• On February 4, a member of the US Coast Guard fell off a ship in the Pacific Ocean, triggering a huge search and rescue operation. During the search, homeland security secretary Krisi Noem reportedly attempted to recall one of the search aircraft to carry out a deportation flight. The missing person was not located.

• Europe: At the time of writing, the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee is set to vote on new deportation legislation which over 70 rights organisations have called on the EU to reject and campaigners gathered outside the Parliament to protest, warning that it provides a blueprint for ICE-style enforcement including raids in communities and mass surveillance. Some find that prospect quite exciting - in countries including Germany, Belgium, and the UK, radical rightwingers have called for ICE tribute acts.

• Frontex is in talks with Poland, Germany and Estonia on hosting the headquarters of a new rapid response force designed to deploy quickly to external borders.

• Greece: Authorities have launched an internal investigation into an incident last month in which a coast guard patrol vessel collided with a boat carrying people migrating, killing fifteen of them. 

• UK: The government-commissioned Cranston inquiry into the November 2021 shipwreck in which dozens died ended in February, concluding that loss of life was avoidable and systemic failures had taken place. Meanwhile an NGO report into the deaths of children in the Channel has alleged “catastrophic failures” on part of British and French authorities, and the Guardian’s Diane Taylor has interviewed some of those returned to France under the “one in one out” deal aimed at cutting small boat crossings.

• Mexico: The New Humanitarian reports on the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, where a combination of US and Mexican border enforcement has pushed tens of thousands of people attempting to migrate into a limbo where they are vulnerable to exploitation, violence, and abuse. Elsewhere a refugee rights organisation has demanded justice after two Haitian girls were found dead in a septic tank at a Mexican immigration facility. 

SURVEILLANCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND INDUSTRY

• US: There’s so much happening it’s difficult to know where to begin but as good a place as any is the continuing march of migration surveillance toward general mass surveillance, the leap facilitated by attempts to spy on protesters. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has signed a deal with Clearview AI to use facial recognition for ‘tactical targeting’, and witnesses have described growing use of biometric tech in the field. The agency’s intelligence platform is increasingly collecting data on US citizens, and meanwhile its parent Department for Homeland Security (DHS) has demanded social media sites reveal names behind anti-ICE posts. Together with the administration’s attack on Anthropic over the firm’s wariness about its models being used in domestic mass surveillance, this illustrates a system that richly rewards supportive tech firms while penalising those that get in its way. Anyway, 404 Media has launched a new zine to help people keep track of it all.  

• A quick check in on contractors: Palantir, AT&T, Deloitte still have the biggest ICE contracts of all (DHS has a US$1bn tab with Palantir), ICE is fast-tracking contracts with private prison provider GEO Group (which suffered a significant court loss over its immigration work recently), and ICE has also tripled its reliance on Microsoft recently. And per The Intercept, ICE’s private prison contractors spent millions lobbying to force banks to give them loans. Meanwhile journalists contend that tracking all these contracts is being made harder. 

• Anti-ICE campaigners are engaging with tech in a widening range of ways, including cancelling subscriptions from ten major tech and AI companies, and launching a letter-writing campaign to hold corporations involved in the ICE supply chain, and beginning dual campaigns against ICE detention centres and data centres, as battles over data centre expansion continues to rage across the US. Campaigners at AFSC have also launched a resource pack on Palantir. 

• In another innovative use of public money/ reason why Americans don’t have affordable healthcare, the US military has shot down a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) drone near the border with Mexico, using its lasers against a wrongly-identified threat for the second time in a week. 

• US/Europe: The EU is pressing ahead with talks to grant US border authorities unprecedented access to Europeans’ data to determine if they pose a “risk to security and public order”, despite growing public concerns about the reach and risks of the US surveillance industry. If anyone sees any evidence of that European strategic independence we keep hearing about, please let us know.

• EU: From lie detectors to biometric databases, the EU’s growing use of artificial intelligence in migration control is exposing gaps in its legal framework, argues a piece in the EU parliament’s house magazine. Algorithm Watch has a more detailed breakdown of the rising European surveillance dragnet. Frontex is also building an app to encourage people to deport themselves. 

• World: The Migration and Technology Monitor and Open Democracy have produced a series of pieces by experts with lived experience of migration, including on digital exclusion and migrant labour exploitation and social media and memory among refugees, and the role of Israeli border tech in ethnic cleansing. The team is also working on an online interactive manifesto for migration and tech. 

• New film The Sandbox explores the global machinery of surveillance and its human cost. 

• UK: Following a court ruling, the Home Office will have to pay compensation to people whose phones were snatched by authorities during the immigration process.

MIGRATION POLICY AND POLITICS

• Europe: An op-ed in the Guardian tackles the far-right’s growing focus around the demand for “remigration”, effectively the ethnic cleansing of Europe through deportation to ensure white majorities. Relatedly, Switzerland will vote this summer on a proposal from the far-right Swiss People’s party (SVP) to limit the country’s population to 10 million. In the UK, the new Restore Britain party has launched, its main selling point being “more deportations than Reform.” Equinox’s Alyna Smith has a longer feature on the drivers and narratives behind the European far right's weaponising of migration. 

• Changing the European Convention on Human Rights will not cut migration, Council of Europe human rights chief Michael O’Flaherty has said, in an apparent rebuke to the Anglo-Danish-led bid to weaken protections. 

• UK: The recently-elected leader of the UK’s largest trade union has a piece out on links between Britain’s beleaguered care system, modern slavery, and the economic importance of migration. The FT meanwhile reports that falling migration threatens to leave gaps in public finances. 

• Spain: As people rush to take up the Spanish government’s landmark offer of regularisation for undocumented people, one former such person writes on the benefits of the scheme. 

• Colombia: Researchers have theorised the form of crisis management that gave rise to Colombia’s relatively inclusive approach to displacement from Venezuela. 

• Brazil: Operation Horizon, a São Paulo initiative uniting civil society, local government and UN agencies helped to regularise nearly 12,800 people in 2025.

• Greece: 56 civil society organizations have issued a joint statement on Athens’ new migration bill, accusing it of criminalising their work. 

CLIMATE, NATURE, AND THE FUTURE OF MIGRATION

• UK/World: Global nature collapse around the world poses a threat to security and prosperity, a report by the UK’s intelligence committee has concluded in a report the government tried to suppress. The report draws some tendentious links between climate and large-scale migration - but it places more emphasis on risks to food security. 

• Ecuador: Mining and oil extraction in Ecuador's Amazon systematically displaces indigenous communities through "dispossessive engineered migration”, argue researchers.

• Bangladesh: A new Nature paper looks at differing attitudes towards environment-linked migration in Bangladesh, and the drivers of those attitudes.