Brussels spent years treating Frontex as a scandal. Today it asked it to become Europe's deportation agency.

Four years ago, Brussels treated Frontex like a crime scene. On Tuesday, it asked the same agency to become Europe's deportation service.

The factsheet the Commission published today does not bother with euphemism. Under the proposal, Frontex "becomes the key operational arm of the EU's return policy". It gets a new Return Coordination Centre "to coordinate and organise returns across the EU", a European Border and Return Reserve, a Quick Reaction Force to be deployed "at very short notice", and, in the line that matters most, the "possibility for Frontex to organise and carry out returns from countries outside the EU".

Magnus Brunner, the Austrian commissioner behind it, was blunter still at the weekend. Frontex "must be made the central EU deportation agency," he told Welt am Sonntag. "Anyone who has no right to stay in the EU must actually leave it." (Our translation.)

It is the right idea. It is also a confession.

From crime scene to flagship

Remember 2022. In April that year Fabrice Leggeri resigned as Frontex's executive director after an investigation by OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud office, into the agency's handling of migrant pushbacks. In October, the European Parliament refused to sign off the agency's 2020 accounts. For the Brussels mainstream, Frontex was something to be supervised, audited and, above all, kept on a short lead.

Leggeri, for the record, now sits in the European Parliament for Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National.

Four years on, the Commission wants a bigger, faster Frontex, built around deportation, with powers that reach beyond Europe's own borders. Frontex is getting a new job description for one reason: the politics around it changed.

One in five

The reason is a number the Commission itself published. When it proposed a new EU return law in March 2025, it wrote that "only around 20% of third-country nationals ordered to leave the Union actually do", in the proposal's own explanatory memorandum. For years, four out of five final orders to leave were, in practice, suggestions.

That law entered into force this month. Brunner's office now says the return rate has climbed above 30 percent this year, and Welt reports that the figure comes from internal Commission numbers. "That is not yet enough," Brunner said. He is right, and it is worth reading the claim the other way round: even after Europe's much-advertised "migration turn", most people ordered to leave still do not.

Frontex is already doing much of the heavy lifting. In 2025 it supported 63,500 returns, 43 percent of all returns at EU level, and laid on more than 220 charter flights, according to today's factsheet. In all but name, it is already Europe's biggest deportation operator. The proposal makes the name match the job.

Test one: who pays

Here is where the confession turns into a dare. The Commission has proposed €12 billion for Frontex in the next seven-year budget, from 2028, double its current allocation, Brunner told Welt. The same paper reports that Ireland, which holds the rotating Council presidency, has halved that sum in a new compromise draft.

"Depending on how high the funds turn out, Frontex can support member states accordingly," Brunner said, as quoted by Austria's Kurier (our translation). Translated from Commission-speak: a deportation agency at half price will deliver half a deportation agency.

The manpower gap is no smaller. The standing corps of up to 10,000 border guards that capitals approved back in 2019 is only due to be fully operational from next year. Frontex directly employs around 1,250 officers today, EUobserver reports. The European People's Party wanted 30,000. Nobody expects to find them.

Every government that has promised voters that Europe would finally take back control should be asked a simple question when the budget is settled: did you vote for the agency, or only for the headline?

Test two: who takes them back

A deportation needs two things: a plane, and a country willing to let it land. The second is where Europe has always failed.

The new powers outside the EU are not a blank cheque. Frontex will need a separate status agreement with each partner country, as it already has with Albania, Serbia and North Macedonia, Euronews reports. The EU is still negotiating one with Senegal. Five governments are working on the first "return hub" outside the Union, which is not expected to open before 2027.

Even planes are not guaranteed. About 5,500 Frontex-supported returns had not been carried out by the end of September because of airspace closures linked to the wars in the Middle East, according to an EUobserver investigation. A Return Coordination Centre in Warsaw does not change who controls the skies over Iraq.

Test three: who watches the watchers

Then there is the line that has not had enough attention. The factsheet promises an "Online Monitoring and Response Centre to monitor also social media activity on unauthorised border crossings".

There is a sensible version of this. Smugglers sell crossings online, and a crowd heading for a fence often organises itself on a phone. Spotting that before it happens is better than counting heads afterwards, as Ceuta learned this summer. But this is the same Commission that wrote the Digital Services Act and has spent years leaning on platforms over what Europeans post online. If the new centre is meant to watch smugglers and border crossings, the law should say exactly that, and nothing broader.

The usual critics are already out. "It's a deportation agency," Josephine Solanki of the Transnational Institute told reporters, Euronews reports, "increasingly operating far away from the actual border of the EU." She means it as a warning. Most voters will read it as the job description. The fair part of the complaint is about oversight, and after 2022 Frontex has every reason to welcome it: the best defence of a tougher agency is one that is lawful, documented and fast.

The plan is not the problem

The proposal now goes to the European Parliament and the Council, where it can be improved, diluted or starved. The legal pieces are finally in place: the migration pact has applied since June, the return law since this month. What remains is the unglamorous part: planes, partner deals, officers and money.

Brussels deserves credit for saying out loud what it spent a decade avoiding: a border is only real if a "no" at the border is enforced. Now the capitals must decide whether they meant it. If they halve the budget, they should not complain next summer, after the next Ceuta, that Europe still cannot send anyone home.