For months now, US President Donald Trump’s administration has been leading a well-publicised crackdown on migration. The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have turned deportations into media spectacles, posting videos of chained deportees and releasing their names to spread fear.

Within the past few weeks, the Trump administration has expanded its deportation surge to include even foreign nationals with legal status in the country, including academics. The president has pledged to deport 11 million people – doubling the number removed under President Joe Biden and even surpassing President Barack Obama’s two terms, during which 5.3 million people were deported.

While the world’s attention is focusing on Trump’s anti-migration spectacle, the European Union is quietly carrying out its own crackdown. Its policies are far less visible, yet they are just as ruthless.

In the first nine months of 2024, EU states issued 327,880 expulsion orders, with 27,740 people forcibly removed between July and September. Deportations have intensified, as EU states have begun implementing the new Pact on Migration and Asylum, which was passed in December 2023 and entered into force in June 2024.

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Under its provisions, EU members are fast-tracking removals, expanding detention centres, and strengthening cooperation with third countries to facilitate deportations. However, it is not only member states that will be part of this.

Balkan countries that have to fulfill certain criteria to become part of the EU, through the EU accession process, are effectively being turned into a border zone for the EU. Unlike EU member states, Balkan candidate states had no say in shaping this pact, yet they are forced to implement it and abide by what can only be described as colonial blackmail.

Most recently, the EU made its expectations clear at the December EU-Western Balkans Summit, declaring that, “We need to strengthen our cooperation and strategic partnerships in migration management, which is a shared challenge and responsibility and a key priority.”

This is part of the EU’s broader strategy to externalise migration control and fortify its borders, but also to move away from any responsibility and accountability for violations of human rights and transfer them on to third countries.

A key part of this strategy is the creation of “return hubs” close to and outside the EU’s borders – places where unwanted people can be warehoused. This model, championed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is already in motion. People are being sent to the Balkans, Turkey and North Africa. Frontex, the EU’s border agency, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) play key roles in enforcing these removals.

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In practice, we can see what that looks like in Croatia, the EU member state bordering two Balkan non-member states – Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Croatia has played an important role in maintaining the EU border regime by normalising pushbacks, which over the years caused numerous deaths and injuries and represented a massive violation of fundamental human rights. Instead of establishing responsibility for this, the EU rewarded Croatia – along with Bulgaria and Romania – by allowing them to join the Schengen Agreement, which abolishes border control between member states.

The EU has also strengthened readmission agreements – bilateral deals that allow EU states to send people back to their country of origin or country of transit, pushing them to the edge of the EU or outside its borders, basically to offload migrants. As a result, the Balkans have become a dumping ground for people the EU wants to expel.

Croatian authorities have not published any reports on migration control since 2020, but Minister of Interior Davor Bozinovic said in January that border police prevented 71,000 “illegal entries” in 2024. The Bosnian Office for Foreigners reported that in 2023, Croatian authorities returned 4,265 people into Bosnian territory. Bosnia, with financial aid from the EU, removed 893 people to their countries of origin or countries that accepted them through interstate agreements, while 96 migrants left through the IOM’s controversial “voluntary return” programme, which scholar Jean-Pierre Gauci has described as “disguised deportation”.

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Currently, Croatia has four detention and return hubs located in Ježevo (near Zagreb), Tovarnik (by the Croatian-Serbian border), Dugi Dol (along the Croatian-Bosnian border) and Trilj (along the Croatian-Bosnian border).

NGOs and journalists have documented widespread rights violations inside these centres, including, inhumane living conditions and indefinite detention. It has also been a consistent practice of the local authorities to send foreign nationals to these centres for a few days and then to take them out and push them across the border with Serbia or Bosnia. There have also been cases of children and single women being detained in overcrowded men’s facilities.

Since the beginning of this year, Croatian police have intensified their activities along the eastern border. Their officers will be joined by colleagues from Slovenia and Italy under a newly signed agreement for joint patrols of the Croatian border. At the same time, border police have received more surveillance cameras and police vehicles equipped with surveillance technology.

After an EU ministerial meeting in Brussels earlier this month, Bozinovic declared that deportations are no longer a “taboo” topic in the EU and that the European Commission was looking into legislative proposals to speed them up.

Croatia’s non-EU borders are already dotted with unmarked graves of people who have perished while on the move to seek safety and security. The new pact will only intensify the brutality asylum seekers face at Croatia’s borders and in non-member states like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia and elsewhere.

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The new pact is allocating millions of euros for policies and technologies that will directly feed into the global politics of dehumanisation of people on the move. It is also empowering Frontex, which has long been accused of complicity in illegal pushbacks and human rights violations, to play an even bigger role in border control and deportations. Its annual budget for deportation-related expenses alone is 18 million euros ($19.5m).

As we write this, alarm bells are ringing across the EU. In Germany, solidarity groups are trying to stop the deportations of Palestinians. In Italy, the government is still looking for ways to send unwanted migrants to centres built for that purpose in Albania. Austria has temporarily halted family reunions for asylum claimants. France has introduced more strict immigration policies and started to deport more people, which led to a row with Algeria due to a high number of deportees.

It is now increasingly clear that Western countries, led by the EU and the US, are using migrants as scapegoats to justify militarised border control. The EU’s collaboration with Israel in developing advanced surveillance and AI technology is central to this strategy. The very systems used to track and control migrants today – drones, biometric databases and predictive policing – were tested in occupied Palestine before being deployed at European borders. Asylum seekers, Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them are the first targets, but they will not be the last.

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If we fail to challenge these policies, this machinery of control will continue expanding, ensnaring more and more people in its grip. The only way forward is to build transnational solidarity networks that resist these injustices and hold those in power accountable while exposing the flawed political and economic systems that allow for the global dehumanisation of disadvantaged communities. The alternative is to remain silent and allow a future where no one is safe.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.