Stop Europe’s new plan
for mass deportations

Sign the petition today. 
Put up the pressure
And join forces with Equinox and 200 other
organisations standing up for a welcoming europe. 

This new proposal takes straight from ICe’s playbook and further criminalises migration, normalises repression and mass deportations.

Petition text

To: the Members of the European Parliament, National Ministers of Home Affairs, and EU Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunner,

Shortly after the adoption of the Migration and Asylum Pact in April 2024, the European Commission proposed In March 2025, a new ‘Return Regulation’. In December 2025, National Ministers of Home Affairs agreed on a position that further tightens this proposal. 

We are deeply concerned that this proposal represents a dangerous escalation on the EU’s shift towards the criminalisation of migration, repression, and mass deportations. 

This regulation would: 

  • Make it easier to deport asylum seekers and migrants to so-called “third countries”, with which they have no connection

  • Expand the grounds on which people subject to a return decision can be detained, risking making it the systematic response under vague conditions

  • Increase the maximum detention period from 18 to 24 months, not excluding children,   

  • Expand surveillance, racial profiling, and sharing of sensitive data, 

  • Allow deportations before appeals are decided, even when a person may later be recognised by courts as having a legitimate right to protection, 

  • Establish deportation prisons, or so-called “return hubs”, outside and inside EU territory.

These measures are inhumane, unjust, and incompatible

with the values the European Union claims to uphold.

They will not create safety. They will only create more suffering.

These rules are built on cruelty, violence, and dehumanisation.
They criminalise migration instead of protecting people.
They treat human beings as security threats rather than people with rights.

We urge you to: 

  • Withdraw the proposed EU Return Regulation.

  • End the expansion of detention and deportation infrastructure, including in third countries. 

  • Focus on policies that create political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental conditions in which peoples' vital rights and freedoms are secure.