Frontex
The European Border and Coast Guard Agency – is the EU's largest agency and a central instrument of the European border regime.
Frontex coordinates border control operations across the Mediterranean and the Balkans, organises deportations from EU member states, and cooperates with dozens of third countries outside the EU through working agreements for data sharing or status agreements to deploy European border police agents. To become more independent from contributions of member states, Frontex is building up its own "Standing Corps", which the EU Commission wants to triple to 30,000 border guards. They are uniformed and armed by Frontex, which makes the "Standing Corps" the first EU police force. Thus, the agency is becoming a symbol of the new neighbourhood policy towards southern Mediterranean countries.
There is barely any direct collaboration between Frontex and the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, apart from training provided to the General Administration for Coastal Security (GACS) under Libya's Interior Ministry. But in 2025 Frontex and the EU Commission started to have "technical meetings" with Libyan authorities both from the Tripolis and the Benghasi governments. However, Frontex assets in the Mediterranean function as the main key to the pullback mechanism that the EU Commission set up in 2017: Their planes and drones carry out aerial surveillance on behalf of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, which has no aeroplanes or helicopters of its own. Thus, Frontex is helping to force people into deportation camps under conditions described by German diplomats as "concentration camp-like".
Crimes of the European Coast Guard Agency Frontex – Second Report
Insights into Frontex’ ongoing and unpunished aerial complicity in human rights violations in the Central Mediterranean Sea – Spring 2024 | Sea Watch
In its daily work in the Central Mediterranean, Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, primarily aims to hinder people from arriving in Europe, no matter the costs. In order to do so, the agency relies on violent militias like the so-called Libyan Coast Guard to intercept people trying to flee. As a result of the agencies’ way of operating, people are forced back to torture, forced labor and exploitation.
This factsheet outlines the way in which Frontex operates in the Central Mediterranean Sea. It provides a selection of representative situations with boats in distress where Frontex was involved in 2022, 2023 and early 2024.1 The factsheet is based on data collected by the Airborne department of Sea-Watch, which carries out monitoring flights in the Central Mediterranean and documents hu- man rights violations. The collected data allows us to draw conclusions about the role of Frontex in pullbacks to Libya.
For more information, download the full report here
Since its founding in 2005, Frontex’s budget has grown to €5.6 billion, allocated for the period 2021–2027. Major budget increases occurred after the summer of migration in 2016 and again in 2019, when the border agency was allowed to acquire its own assets and build up the "Standing Corps". The agency regularly publishes "risk analyses" that frame migration as a threat – and uses these to recommend the expansion of border controls and its own operational capacities. Critics argue that Frontex systematically produces the justifications for its own militarisation.
Frontex has recently restructured its operations, establishing regional commands outside its Warsaw headquarters for the first time, coordinating deployments by land, sea and air. In parallel, the agency is developing digital tools to manage deportations, including apps designed to push migrants towards so-called "voluntary returns", which in many cases are forced deportations. Command structures are already being decentralised into seven geographical areas of operation. Furthermore, Frontex is deploying its troops to six third countries, with Ukraine now applying as well. In these countries, the agency also intends to operate with its "Return Centre", which would significantly increase the annual number of deportations as a full-service provider not only for EU states anymore. Meanwhile, construction of Frontex's new and much larger headquarters in Warsaw has already begun.
Defund Frontex, Build a European Search and Rescue Programme
fragdenstaat.de
European states have the obligation under international maritime law to rescue people in distress at sea. For many years, civil society, international organisations and citizens have demanded that Europe comply with this obligation and mobilise the necessary resources to prevent people from drowning. Yet these calls have invariably been met with disdain from the EU and its Member States, which chose instead to focus on ever more border policing.
A research report by FragDenStaat and the sea rescue organisation Sea-Watch laid bare in 2021 what still holds true today: on the one hand, the choice not to deploy the resources needed to save lives at sea has caused the death of thousands of people. On the other, by relentlessly reinforcing its border policing, including through dangerous partnerships, the EU has only made the Mediterranean route to Europe more deadly.
The role of the EU border force Frontex is central to this deadly dynamic. While the border police claims that search and rescue is a "crucial component" of its sea operations, Frontex has in fact worked for years to render its own rescue capabilities useless.
The most blatant example: the prioritisation of aerial surveillance combined with a disregard for presence at sea. Between 2015 and 2021 alone, Frontex invested €100 million in expanding its own aerial capabilities, and €0 in maritime assets. Nothing about this fundamental choice has changed since: Frontex continues to rely on planes and drones instead of rescue ships.
Frontex presence in the air instead of at sea means the agency can spot boats in distress from its aircraft, but cannot send ships to carry out a rescue. The consequences, as should be expected, are deadly.
Borders over lives: policing comes first
Since its founding in 2005, the EU has poured unlimited resources into building and expanding its border giant Frontex, today the EU's largest agency with a budget of €5.6 billion (2021–2027). Over the same period, the Mediterranean became, and remains, world’s deadliest migration route.
These two developments, the growth of Frontex and the ever-mounting number of deaths at sea, must be read as one: a political choice, made and carefully planned by the EU and its Member States, to protect borders over lives.
In 2016, as a pretext to avoid investing the resources needed to ensure safety at sea, the EU declared that its obligation to rescue would henceforth be met by law enforcement actors at sea, namely Frontex. The EU's border force could be trusted with rescue, the European Commission argued.
When the research was published in 2021, more than 18,700 people had already drowned in the Mediterranean since 2015. Today, in 2026, the figure exceeds 30,000 (IOM minimum estimates). The tragic proof that border policing is incompatible with search and rescue, by default and by design, is delivered anew every year.
It is long overdue for the EU to face this reality. Effective action to prevent further loss of life at sea is urgently needed.
Defund Frontex: towards a European Search and Rescue Programme
We join the demand to defund the border police force Frontex, and to divest those valuable resources into a life-saving Search and Rescue Programme for the Mediterranean.
Only by dismantling the structures that have caused, and continue to cause, violence and death at sea can we begin to create safety for all. In their place, we must build new systems and structures that preserve and protect life at sea.
The fundamental right to life is non-negotiable, and so must be the creation of a European Search and Rescue Programme. A body with one mission only: to guarantee safety at sea and to preserve the lives of those in danger; public-led, and run and operated exclusively by non-military, non-law enforcement actors.
The 2021 research showed that creating such a programme would require merely one third of the budget the EU grants to Frontex's border operations. Nothing about that calculation has fundamentally changed. What is missing is not the money. What is missing is the political decision. Frontex cannot and will not guarantee safety. Its resources, however, can.
