EU border agency | Frontex stops financial support for “returnees”

Frontex boss Hans Leijtens with the German head of the Warsaw "return center" Lars Gerdes Photo: Frontex The EU border agency Frontex is not only increasingly organizing deportations for the member states, but is also paying money to people who leave the EU "voluntarily" or under duress. The program is called the “EU Reintegration Program” (EURP) and is intended to help “returnees” regain a foothold in their country of origin. In 2024, the agency spent 35.3 million euros on this; last year it was 76 million euros; This year there will probably be even more.

However, at the beginning of October, Frontex announced that it would suspend support until further notice. According to Politico, the budget was used up much earlier than planned. But money isn't the program's only problem. To date, there is no legal option to take action against Frontex if those affected do not receive the promised help.

Documents released by Frontex under freedom of information laws also show that as public interest in the "return program" increased, Frontex asked national authorities to pass on less data to journalists and researchers. When asked, a spokesman for the agency said that Frontex was still committed to transparency and justified this by releasing the documents - which the agency is legally obliged to do. Regarding the EURP itself, a spokesman says that the suspension is temporary and that the program itself will not be discontinued.

Frontex opened a “return center” at its headquarters in Warsaw in 2020, which is headed by the German Lars Gerdes. This became possible after the EU states expanded the agency's mandate accordingly the previous year. The new 2019 regulation also authorized Frontex to provide support for “voluntary returns” in cooperation with member states. National immigration authorities were able to use the agency's flight booking system to directly purchase tickets for people who had agreed in principle to be deported. Of the 63,000 “repatriations” that Frontex accompanied in 2025, the agency classified two thirds as “voluntary.”

The regulation also allowed Frontex to directly support all “returnees” – even after they have been deported. The EURP started in 2022. Through the program, Frontex gives each person affected several thousand euros within six months of leaving the country. Frontex commissioned six international organizations to disburse the EURP funds.

According to the Frontex regulation, the agency is only allowed to deport people for whom a return decision has been made. This is an administrative or court decision that requires you to leave the country and can only be issued by the member states. He confirms that the authorities have checked whether the person to be deported is at risk of being sent back to an unsafe state. It also enables the person obliged to leave the country to legally challenge their expulsion.

However, for years Frontex organized “repatriations” without the required decisions being made. This is also proven by documents that Frontex had to release following a freedom of information request. This was also confirmed in December 2025 by the European Court of Justice, which ruled that Frontex had failed to check in the case of a Syrian family in Greece whether return decisions were made before deportation.

Due to the lack of a decision, Frontex could be found guilty of shared responsibility for violating the ban on refoulement - even if the returns themselves were classified as voluntary. Because this ban on refoulment is a core principle of international law.

That wasn't an isolated case. In 2024, the agency itself discovered that it had carried out its “voluntary returns” in nine of the 31 Schengen states in which it operated without making the necessary return decisions. In the same year, representatives of the EU Commission also noted that the border agency was violating its regulation with this practice.

Frontex gave the EU states time to adapt and only closed the legal loophole in April 2025 with an instruction from Executive Director Hans Leijtens, according to which a decision to return is a condition for EURP support in the future.

Frontex's deployment of "voluntary returns" was in line with the Commission's goal, which was confirmed in 2022, of steadily increasing the number and proportion of such "repatriations" from Europe. From 2021 to 2025, the number of people Frontex forcibly returned increased by only 60 percent. In contrast, voluntary “repatriations” financed by Frontex grew by almost 800 percent.

Frontex presentation to the Council of the EU in January 2024. Photo: Frontex  

In July 2020, charter flights were used for the first time and 209 people were flown from France to Albania within two days. Each flight cost around 49,000 euros - a third of what a deportation charter can cost. The Commission also confirmed in a communication in 2021 that these are “generally more cost-effective” and backed this up with an estimate from the European Parliament’s Research Service. Accordingly, 3,414 euros are due per deportation, compared to 560 euros per “voluntary” return.

Research by the Austrian “Standard” shows how much “returnees” from EU countries were left to fend for themselves after landing in their homeland. The newspaper spoke to three people who returned to Syria from Austria after January 2025 on flights organized by Frontex. None of them knew that Frontex had paid for their flight and would have been responsible for the subsequent support. Two never received the help they said they were promised, even after they contacted the authorities who deported them.

»There is no legal title or court ruling that awards or guarantees them this money. Legally and actually, it seems highly unlikely that such a claim could be enforced in an Austrian court," explained Sebastian Sperner, legal advisor to the Vienna human rights NGO Asylum Coordination. Enforcing a claim after leaving EU territory is even more difficult. Last year, Sperner's organization learned of several cases in which "returnees" were in such a situation.

"With the consent of those affected," said a Frontex spokesman, "we can examine their cases together with the Austrian authorities." However, the agency's response suggests that Frontex wants to stay out of the picture: "People who have a problem with promised help can contact the reintegration partner or the member state that referred them."

The problem of a lack of EURP aid is not limited to Austria: Of the 8,646 Syrian nationals who were deported to Syria by EU states with the help of Frontex between March 2025 and April 2026, around 40 percent did not receive EURP support - even though the agency had spent 7.1 million euros on their return. Syrians were only the second largest recipient group of Frontex aid in 2025, according to an agency presentation from earlier this year; People from Turkey came first and people from Iraq came third.

For this research, we asked Frontex for a breakdown of EURP recipients over the past two years to determine which nationalities were particularly affected by a lack of aid. The agency had previously published this data, most recently in November 2025. This time the request was rejected. “Frontex cannot pass on data broken down by year and nationality to the public without the express consent of the member state concerned,” the spokesman wrote. Although “transparency is the rule,” as the Frontex representatives stated, the agency must also ensure that “sensitive operational data” remains protected.

Excerpt from a Frontex presentation at the informal meeting of interior ministers in January 2026 Photo: Frontex The suspicion is that the restraint is part of a strategy with which Frontex and the EU member states want to protect themselves from control. Frontex officials told representatives from EU countries at an internal meeting in April 2026 that cooperation on post-deportation assistance was attracting more public attention. This emerges from a document that Frontex released at the request of the research group.

The agency therefore asked all Member States present as well as EURP's NGO partners to consult them before publicly disseminating information. Frontex also gave participants tips on how to withhold information.

When asked, Frontex denied that it had instructed member states to coordinate with the agency on publications. They simply explained “the rules for access to documents as far as consultation on documents that come from another party is concerned.”

The EURP program for reintegration after return to the country of origin, which Frontex stopped at its own decision, is to be continued according to the will of the EU Commission. It is now frantically trying to raise an additional €50 million to close the funding gap for the current financial year.

Frontex’s “repatriations” are to be further expanded. On October 27th, EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner presented a proposal for a new Frontex regulation, which, among other things, should enable deportations between states outside the EU. The EURP is also mentioned in it: “In the future, Frontex will be responsible for supporting returns from A to Z, from strategic planning to cost-effective returns and reintegration,” said Brunner.

Of the almost 12 billion euros that the Commission is proposing for Frontex in its next seven-year budget, more than 2 billion euros will go to the forced and "voluntary" departure of those seeking protection alone.

With us, no one has to pay to be informed. Sounds like a bad business model? It is too. But independent journalism and participation for everyone are more important to us than profit. Journalism still costs money: research, printing and all the people who do it. That's why we depend on you. We need 300,000 euros by the end of the year.

Donate once or regularly, every amount counts. So that nd remains.