Images of the US campaign against illegal immigration have been seen and shared around the world.
Launched by US president Donald Trump immediately on his return to power, the ongoing crackdown betrays America's drift into authoritarianism.
It also shows something else: Europe's own migration policies are not so different.
As soon as Trump retook the presidency in January 2025, he launched a massive deportation campaign against illegal immigrants. Arrests and incarcerations by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – the agency responsible for border control – are going on across the country.
According to the White House, ICE has arrested 100,000 undocumented immigrants since Trump took office. An estimated 59,000 people are currently being held in ICE detention centres, and several tens of thousands of detainees have already been deported. The American president's stated aim is to expel 3,000 people a day.
These numbers must be put in context, says political scientist Cas Mudde.
“I think many Europeans have a skewed view of the US, seeing it too positively when Democrats have the presidency and too negatively when the Republicans are in power," he said. "Fact is, immigration raids and particularly deportations have been very high under presidents Obama and Biden too.”
“The main difference is that the state focuses almost exclusively on undocumented foreigners with a criminal record under the Democrats, and takes a more indiscriminate approach under the Republicans,” Mudde also said.
According to a paper from the Migration Policy Institute, the Biden administration did indeed naturalise nearly 3.5 million people (a record for any presidential term), while expanding legal avenues for migration.
But it also carried out a record number of deportations. An ICE document counts more than 271,000 in the last year of Biden's term. That was the highest number in a decade, surpassing that of Trump's first term.
“Trump is expanding on the anti-immigration apparatus of previous administrations”, said Mudde.
“His attacks on universities build upon arguments broadly used by liberals (from the Biden administration to the New York Times), for instance in the alleged “antisemitism” [among pro-Palestinian student movements] on university campuses. This simply shows, again, that there is no hard line between the 'mainstream' and the far-right,” he added.
America's ongoing anti-immigrant crackdown has received a great deal of media coverage. It is unprecedented in that it has brought into the everyday lives of millions of Americans the kind of brutality that is usually reserved for a distant place: the border.
For several months now, both social media and the mainstream media have been abuzz with images of people being arrested — on the street, at work, and even in the corridors of immigration courts.
The profile of the individuals swept up is revealing: almost half of those currently in detention reportedly have no criminal record. That contradicts the rhetoric of the Trump administration, which claims to be targeting mainly criminals.
In its quest for arrests, the US government would also like to target people with temporary-protection status or work permits, depriving them of their residency and exposing them to possible deportation.
A part of American public opinion strongly disapproves of the Trump administration's conduct, as evidenced by the demonstrations that have broken out across the country.
The US government has already had to back down on certain points, notably concerning arrests in the agricultural and hospitality sectors, which are heavily dependent on immigrant labour.
'I think many Europeans have a skewed view of the US, which they see too positively when the Democrats are in the presidency and too negatively when the Republicans are in power. The fact is that immigration raids and especially deportations were very high under presidents Obama and Biden as well'
Having run short of funds, ICE received a colossal boost to its budget in early July. It can now use over $100bn [€85.6bn] until 2029 (compared to a previous budget of less than $10bn per year) to recruit staff, expand detention capacity and increase deportations to unprecedented levels.
Virtually overnight, ICE has become the most well-funded federal law enforcement agency in the nation's history.
“While the authoritarian turn is abrupt and quite extreme, the Trump administration has lost almost every court case related to its authoritarian agenda”, cautions Mudde. “Hence, there is an authoritarian attack on a constitutional democracy, and it is far too early to decide who will win.”
For Mudde, asking whether a similar situation is taking place in Europe is to ignore what is, and has been, happening in a host of mostly east/central European countries like Hungary, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia.
"But liberal democracy and the rule of law have also been undermined by mostly mainstream parties in Austria and the Netherlands, to name but a few,” he said.
In combination with an acceleration of anti-immigration rhetoric, the presence of far-right parties at the reins of certain European countries has led to a proliferation of widely-criticised migration policies.
An EU Commission bill allowing for the creation of “return centres” in third countries has been attacked by human-rights organisations, who see it as a short-termist measure at odds with international law.
A memo from the Polish EU Council presidency circulated before the proposal was published, only adding to those concerns.
As the NGO Statewatch noted: “The prevailing position [amongst member states] is to have the legal basis framed in a flexible way that would also allow for more tailor-made applications in agreement with the potential host countries of the hubs and would prevent judicial scrutiny that could put the implementation of this innovative solution at risk.”
In short: the proposal should be formulated in such a way that the launch and operation of the detention centres are not hindered by the courts — as was the case with the 'Rwandan solution' in the UK or the agreement between Italy and Albania.
Abuses are indeed reduced by legal constraints on the treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers. But some governments are already operating on the fringes of the law.
In Greece, 1,626 refugees and migrants were placed in pre-removal detention centres in 2024, according to a report by the NGO Refugee Support Aegean (RSA).
Afghans and Syrians are the two groups most frequently placed in such detention (7012 and 5724 people respectively).
For RSA, this state of affairs raises “serious concerns about the legality and appropriateness of imposing deprivation of liberty”. After all, the overwhelming majority of them are refugees who cannot be deported to their country of origin.
About 14 percent of detentions were challenged in 2024. That low figure was influenced by the difficulty of appealing and the lack of legal assistance in Greece. Yet 42 percent of the objections to detention examined by the courts of first instance last year were deemed admissible.
Meanwhile, no convictions were handed down against the police for illegal arrests or deportations, nor for informal arrests or refoulements.
Despite the fall in the number of expulsions actually carried out, the number of expulsion orders increased last year, to 31,629 (compared with 29,869 in 2023).
“We continue to point out that the police authorities are circumventing European law by issuing indiscriminate expulsion decisions against newly arrived asylum-seekers”, comments RSA.
A 2025 report by PICUM, an organisation supporting undocumented migrants, illustrates how migrants and the people who assist them are increasingly being criminalised in Europe.
In 2024, at least 94 migrants were prosecuted for facilitating irregular immigration, and 142 human-rights defenders for supporting exiles.
In 2023, the European Commission proposed a change in the rules on tackling human trafficking. For Silvia Carta, an advocacy officer for PICUM, the proposed revision of the Facilitation Directive “will expose people to the risk of criminal prosecution simply for crossing borders or helping others in need.”
In late 2024, several NGOs (including PICUM) filed a complaint with the European Ombudsman denouncing the commission's failure to properly assess the impact of proposed new laws to combat migrant trafficking.
For Carta, “the European Ombudsman's decision to open an inquiry against the commission is an important recognition that this proposal risks violating fundamental rights and that the commission has not taken these risks seriously.”
According to Frontex, the agency responsible for policing the EU's external borders, illegal entries into Europe decreased by 20 percent in the first few months of 2025, totalling 63,700. The agency attributes this drop to tighter border controls and the weather.
This obscures a darker reality.
So far in 2025, 752 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration. Most of those deaths occurred along the central Mediterranean route.
Far from being moved by the plight of migrants, some politicians see brutality as a straightforward goal of migration policy.
'Police raids [targeting migrants] are not unique to the United States. We've seen them all over Europe'
On 28 June 2025, the Greek government appointed Thanos Plevris, an Islamophobic and antisemitic far-right politician, as migration minister.
Back in 2011, when he was a member of the Greek parliament, Plevris detailed his vision of border defence: “Guarding borders cannot be done without losses, and to be clear, without deaths. Guarding borders means deaths.”
He was talking at a rally organised by the far-right magazine Patria. He also elaborated on his understanding of reception policies. “If [the migrants] are not worse off [here], they'll come. They must be worse off [than in their country of origin]. Their life, their hell, must look like paradise compared to what they'll experience here.”
Civil society is also affected by migration policies. In a report published in late 2024, Amnesty International denounced Spain's migration policies as a step backwards in terms of respect for human rights.
Specifically, Amnesty points out that the country, alongside Germany and Sweden, is one of the EU's biggest practitioners of ethnic profiling, thus revealing the “structural racism that exists” there.
In 2024, 3,031 foreign nationals were expelled from Spain for various reasons relating to national security, according to the Spanish interior minister. These figures represent an increase of almost 50 percent on the number of expulsions processed three years earlier.
“Police raids [targeting migrants] are not unique to the United States”, points out Garyfallia Mylona, advocacy officer for PICUM. “We've seen them all over Europe, in migrant camps in Calais, in France; in parks, train stations and restaurants in Belgium; in nail bars and car washes in the UK."
"All too often, undocumented migrants also risk detention and deportation if they try to access public services. For example in Germany, where most public authorities are obliged to report them to the immigration authorities,” Mylona also said.
Arrests and reporting requirements do not just harm individuals and divide families, they also spread fear and distrust of institutions among migrant communities. For Mylona: “Political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic must promote inclusion and strong social protection systems, instead of sowing division and violence.”
The violence seen today on American streets is echoed in that unfolding in the Mediterranean, at the Poland-Belarus border and along the Balkan route.
Across the world, the criminalisation of migration marches on. Trump's America is no exception.
European countries — not just those run by the far-right, and not just those traditionally considered authoritarian — were already descending the slippery slope on which the United States has now embarked.
This article was produced as part of the PULSE, a European initiative supporting cross-border journalistic cooperation. It was first published on Voxeurop. Lola García-Ajofrín (El Confidencial) and Dimitris Angelidis (Efsyn) contributed to its writing.
This year, we turn 25 and are looking for 2,500 new supporting members to take their stake in EU democracy. A functioning EU relies on a well-informed public – you.
Adrian Burtin is a French journalist based in Brussels. The piece was translated by Harry Bowden