On March 15th 2025, the Network Against Migrant Detention NAMD held a transnational assembly attended by activists and groups from Italy, Hungary, France, Germany, Bosnia, Austria, Greece and Tunisia. During the meeting we addressed the increasingly oppressive policies that are taking hold across Europe and beyond, together with matters such as deportation and confinement of people on the move as well as the increasing militarization of borders, emerged forcefully. We are facing a historical period in which the conjuncture of wars ferociously fueled by the sovereigntist and authoritarian oligarchies is dangerously merging with a securitarian turn that precisely in the control and selection of free migration finds one of its most violent spaces for manoeuvre. A historical phase that poses the necessity to get reorganized with new forms of struggle and cooperation.
A central theme of the assembly was indeed the urgent need to build a transnational, European and Mediterranean movement capable of opposing the policies of mass detention, deportation, apartheid and territorial segregation. During the rich and articulate discussion, the priority emerged of building political networks and campaigns capable of responding to the violent attack that, especially on a European scale, is being waged against the rights and freedom of people on the move.
In this regard, we focused our discussion on the New European Pact on Migration and Asylum and its repressive measures, such as the acceleration of screening procedures, the opening of new detention centers for adults and minors, agreements with third countries for extra-territorial deportations, and the further erosion of the right to asylum with border procedures. We have strongly denounced how these measures aim in an unprecedented way to erode the fundamental rights of migrants, treating them as commodities to be rejected or included in segregating and subservient forms, while the European asylum system, we would like to point this out, is being progressively dismantled.
Several emphasised how crucial it is to join forces to stop the opening of new pre-removal detentions centers, i.e. CPRs, in Italy as much as in Europe. This privatized and dehumanizing detention system just cannot be accepted. It is precisely in reference to this issue that we have reiterated a double intention, trying to widen the participation of territorial realities in our network as much as possible: on the one hand we intend to continue to contest, through monitoring, denunciations and mobilizations, the very existence and operation of the CPRs and other detention centers currently active, and on the other hand we will be ready and well organized to do our utmost to block the opening of new state lagers.
Picture: NAMD
While starting from our territorial practices, we have repeatedly affirmed the importance of maintaining a transnational posture and approach in the fight against the border regime and its racist, oppressive, parasitic and violent nature, as violations of the fundamental rights and the dignity and independence of migrant people know no borders and are rather reinforced and multiplied through them, with the collaboration of the different populist, sovereigntist and right-wing governments that are emerging at all latitudes. The violence suffered by people on the move along the Balkan route, in North Africa, on Europe’s internal borders or in America are the result of policies of selective and subaltern rejection and inclusion that continue to destroy and make precarious the lives of millions.
NAMD Transnational Assembly
To be informed about the next steps and mobilisations: againstmigrantdetention@gmail.com
