Five European Union countries are pressing ahead with plans to deport rejected asylum seekers to “return hubs” outside the bloc, days after the E.U. adopted new rules this week that clear the way for the practice.
Greece, Germany, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands agreed on a common framework for the hubs, where people who have exhausted their legal options to stay in Europe would be sent if they cannot be returned to their home countries. “When it comes to return hubs, it’s progressing very well,” Morten Bødskov, Denmark’s interior minister, told reporters on Thursday, according to AFP. “We are moving in the right direction.”
Mr. Bødskov has said Denmark expects “to be ready to transfer the first irregular migrants to a partner country outside the EU within 2027.” Thanos Plevris, Greece’s migration minister, told Politico that Greece aims to have a pilot project in place in the first half of next year.
No destination has been confirmed. Rwanda has been reported as a possible partner, and a Greek government statement said the hubs would sit in safe third countries, “particularly on the African continent.”
The E.U. has pitched the hubs as a deterrent. A discussion paper published by the European Council in October 2025 said they could “incentivize voluntary returns,” since migrants who defy a deportation order could be transferred to a hub, and could discourage people without valid asylum claims from making dangerous journeys. The new rules let member states strike agreements with non-E.U. countries, but only if those countries respect international human rights standards, including the principle of non-refoulement, which bars sending anyone back to face torture or other irreparable harm.
The blueprint comes from Washington, where the Supreme Court has let President Trump resume third-country deportations. More than 100 deportees were sent to eight African countries over a 10-day period in August, including Liberia, Rwanda, Eswatini and Sierra Leone, according to internal U.S. government documents obtained by CBS News. Mr. Plevris has praised the American approach. “I am a fan of President Trump,” he told Breitbart in August. “But if you ask me what was the best thing he did, it was change the migration policy of the USA, because now we have a new migration policy also in Europe.”
Britain offers the cautionary case. The former Conservative government tried to send asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed there; the U.K. Supreme Court ruled the plan unlawful in 2023, before it began, over the risk that refugees could end up returned to countries where they faced persecution. The Labour government abandoned the policy the following year. By June 2024 the Home Office had spent 715 million pounds, nearly $950 million, on the program, and no asylum seekers were forcibly relocated. Four people traveled to Rwanda voluntarily.
“One lesson may be that European governments should expect litigation, even where the third country looks considerably less controversial than Rwanda,” Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, told CBS News on Friday. Deterrence, he said, assumes migrants believe there is a realistic chance they will actually be transferred. “The broader lesson from Rwanda is that externalization is not a shortcut around the difficult parts of migration policy,” Mr. Walsh said. Governments still have to deal with courts, individual rights, uncooperative countries and substantial costs.
The push is part of a broader tightening of asylum and immigration rules across Europe, under pressure on governments to remove more people who have no legal right to remain. Jacob Reynolds, policy director at the Freedom and Sovereignty Initiative Europe, a right-wing think tank in Brussels, called the decision a “welcome step towards gaining control of our borders and removing those who have no right to be here.”
But Mr. Reynolds also said that “outsourcing the problem of illegal migration to third countries” risks avoiding what he called the lack of control over Europe’s borders, and that without “much more fundamental action” on the regimes available to asylum seekers, “the problem will not be solved.”