EU lawmakers vote to make it easier to set up migrant detention centers outside the bloc

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BRUSSELS (AP) — European lawmakers voted Thursday to ease the setting up of new migrant detention centers outside the European Union, known as “return hubs.”

Members of the European Parliament voted 389-206 in favor, with 32 abstentions. Right-wing parties made an alliance with far-right groups that they had previously shunned to pass the measure, while parties of the left and center voted against.

Any EU nation can now negotiate on its own or in small coalitions to deport migrants not to their home countries but to facilities yet to be built outside the 27-nation bloc.

Already, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Denmark have entered into negotiations with governments mainly in Africa to host sites to hold migrants denied asylum.

Far-right parties in Europe have praised the deportation policies of U.S. President Donald Trump and have called for the EU to adopt a similar approach.

Belgium’s far-right Vlaams Belang party and Germany’s far-right AfD party both said in January that they want to form a police group focused on finding and deporting migrants akin to U.S. efforts.

Charlie Weimers, a lawmaker from the right-wing Sweden Democrats and strong proponent of harsher migration policies, said Thursday's vote heralds a new era in the EU.

“There is a new consensus in Europe. The era of deportations has begun,” he said in a social media post.

However, human rights groups say migrants are being brutalized and pushed back illegally at EU borders, while legal protections are increasingly being hollowed out.

Marta Welander, EU advocacy director for the International Rescue Committee, said the vote was “a historic setback for refugee rights.”

She warned it would “pave the way towards a new punitive EU asylum and migration regime, designed to deter, detain and deport people seeking safety. The EU should stand for a system that protects lives, not one that criminalizes survival.”

French lawmaker Mélissa Camara, who voted against the measure, said it passed only by centrist groups allying with the far-right.

“History will remember that the so-called moderate right-wing group sounded the death knell of what remained of the cordon sanitaire,” said Camara, who said ‘return hubs’ are places far from Europe “where fundamental rights cannot be effectively monitored.”