Alarmed and astonished, we observe the footage coming from Minneapolis, where the excessive use of force has crossed every line. We wonder how this could have happened, and perhaps we might even say that such situations could never occur here, in Europe.
However, the situation is not an anomaly; it is the consequence of years of dehumanizing migration policies and should serve as a warning. Not only about the direction of United States immigration policy, but about a broader trend in the management of human mobility within Western democracies. The tightening of migratory control, the expansion of administrative detention, and the normalization of exceptional practices are often presented as technical responses to a supposed national security problem. Yet, from a human rights protection perspective, these policies reveal a deeper process: the gradual erosion of basic guarantees when migration becomes an area where the State operates with expanding margins of discretionary power.
“The actions of ICE that we observe in Minneapolis reflect a pattern of abusive force that violates international human rights standards”
The role of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE) sits within this framework. Beyond individual episodes or particular political moments, its central role in the U.S. migratory control system illustrates how the border shifts inward into the territory, how administrative status becomes a factor of legal vulnerability, and how broad sectors of the migrant population live under the constant threat of detention and expulsion.
The actions of ICE we observe in Minneapolis reflect a pattern of abusive force that violates international human rights standards. According to these international norms, lethal force may be used only as a last resort, when it is strictly unavoidable to protect life, and it requires immediate medical attention for the injured, as well as conducting prompt, independent, impartial, and transparent investigations into any potentially unlawful death. These principles are not being respected in the current context of migratory operations, which have generated fear, protests, and serious risks to the lives of migrants and others.
Parallels in Europe
Far from being a US exception, these dynamics have clear parallels in Europe. In recent years, the European Union and its member states have strengthened migration-control mechanisms and tolerated practices that openly strain international human rights standards. Detention centers, hot returns, the externalization of border control, among many other practices, respond to a similar logic: managing migration through exception, even when doing so entails violating fundamental guarantees stemming from international human rights law.
In the European context, regarding the lethal use of force by authorities as a last resort, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has reiterated this requirement in recent judgments against Greece. In Alkhatib and Others v. Greece (2024) and Almukhlas and Al-Maliki v. Greece (2025), the ECtHR concluded that the use of firearms by the coast guard during interceptions of vessels carrying migrants did not meet the criteria of “absolute necessity” nor the proportionality demanded by Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court stressed that the authorities should have anticipated the presence of passengers—including hidden migrants—taken measures to minimize risks to life and considered alternatives to lethal force, in addition to ensuring effective investigations; their failure led to Greece’s substantive violations of the right to life.
“The proposal for a new Returns Regulation (March 2025) consolidates the punitive and externalizing shift in the EU’s migration policy”
On the other hand, with regard to the latest proposals from the European Commission, it is essential to mention the proposal for a new Returns Regulation (March 2025) that consolidates the punitive and externalizing shift in EU migration policy. Perhaps its most controversial element is the introduction of the so-called return hubs, return centers in third countries where people with rejected asylum applications could be detained while awaiting deportation, including to countries with which they have no personal ties. Although the Commission presents them as an “innovative” solution, formally limited to adults and subject to alleged safeguards, these centers pose a high risk of arbitrary detention, family separation, lack of judicial oversight, and grave human rights violations.
This proposal aligns with recent externalization experiences, such as the UK–Rwanda agreement and the Italy–Albania pact. The British plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was ultimately ruled illegal by the Supreme Court and abandoned in 2024, becoming a paradigmatic example of the legal and human risks of deporting people to third countries deemed “safe” in an artificial way. Likewise, the agreement between Italy and Albania to host migrants outside the EU has repeatedly been blocked by courts and questioned for its viability and legality. The new Returns Regulation could institutionalize these kinds of failed models across Europe, normalizing externalization, detention, and deportation as central pillars of migration policy, to the detriment of rights-based alternatives.
Against the European Convention on Human Rights
Finally, there is another threat to human rights protection in the European context, this time from some member states of the Council of Europe: after a meeting of Council of Europe states on the occasion of International Human Rights Day, twenty-seven countries called for a “migration reform” that openly questions the role of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights in protecting migrants and asylum seekers. This initiative, aiming to restrict or recalibrate the interpretation of the Convention’s rights in the migration sphere, carries significant dangers not only for the protection of these people but also for the integrity of the Convention system as a whole. By challenging foundational principles such as the absolute prohibition of refoulement, judicial independence, and the Court’s interpretative authority, this proposal risk shifting the focus from protection against abuses of power toward a logic of permanent exception.
“From a human rights perspective, regularization does not by itself eliminate the tensions of migratory control, but it questions its logic”
In this context, debates on regularization gain particular relevance. Far from being an exceptional concession or a “pull factor,” regularization can be read as a logical solution that seeks to address the system’s anomalies and, therefore, respect access to human rights for a large portion of the population. From a human rights perspective, regularization does not by itself eliminate the tensions of migration control, but it does question its logic. Recognizing rights, stabilizing administrative situations, and reducing arbitrariness not only improves the living conditions of migrants but also strengthens the rule of law itself. Facing fear-based and exclusionary models, the comparison between the United States and Europe raises a central question: if the warning is already on the table, what lessons are we willing to draw before normalizing, here as well, policies that hollow out the principles we claim to defend?
