When people told aid worker Fayad Mulla that as soon as asylum seekers land on Greek soil, they’re immediately chased by groups of “masked men” assigned to kidnap them, Mulla found it hard to lend the stories credence.
Reports and rumors about black ops by Greek authorities have floated around for years, but the idea of state-sanctioned thugs running around beating migrants, throwing them in the trunks of cars, and forcing them back onto boats was too much for Mulla to believe. “It’s a European Union country,” he told an interviewer from the BBC, explaining his skepticism. That changed when he caught it on tape.
Through a long lens, he recorded a video of Greek guards on the island of Lesbos marching migrant families onto a speedboat. In one shot, you can clearly see a uniformed man in a balaclava carrying a child onto the boat. It’s shocking, yet this is part of a logical progression of escalating violence against migrants as governments erode the linked rights to asylum and rescue.
The BBC interviewed Mulla as part of its new documentary, “Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?” which starts with the question and ends with the facts: The Hellenic Coast Guard has turned the internationally recognized right of refugees to apply for asylum into a sick game, chasing down every man, woman, and child who lands unbidden in the country’s archipelago as part of a coordinated effort to deny them asylum rights.
Rather than an exception, the Greek strategy has become a signature model in the global war on asylum-seekers. From Venezuela to Mexico to Libya to Hungary to Japan, we’re seeing a semi-coordinated effort among wealthy countries to abolish one of the few legal responsibilities the world’s rich and comfortable have toward the poor and afflicted.
The Greek strategy has become a signature model in the global war on asylum-seekers.
Mulla’s video, first published by the New York Times in 2023, is a smoking gun, but analysts have also compiled a ton of circumstantial evidence that details an inescapable pattern. Forensic Architecture tracked and mapped over 2,000 instances of what the research group calls “drift-backs” from Greek territorial waters between 2020 and 2023. Once captured by the masked men, migrants are put onto motorless rubber boats and literally shoved toward Turkish territorial waters. Instead of the authorities expelling people directly, according to Forensic Architecture, “natural processes and geographical features of the Aegean archipelago — currents, waves, winds and uninhabited rocks — carry out the expulsion, distancing the perpetrators from the impact of their lethal actions.” The group counts 55,445 people expelled via the technique over three years, including 24 deaths and 17 disappearances.
Not included in the Forensic Architecture count is the June 2023 sinking of the migrant ship Adriana in the Mediterranean, in which over 600 people lost their lives. As recounted by survivors in “Dead Calm,” the Hellenic Coast Guard was so slow to respond to the ship’s distress that presumed negligence becomes probable malice. Ultimately, it was a Mexican-owned luxury yacht that came to the rescue, such as it was. But the Greeks weren’t the only ones responsible for the Adriana disaster: As Mulla said, Greece is part of the EU, and the EU has Frontex, an international border management agency. At its Polish headquarters, Frontex was monitoring the situation, but that didn’t do the passengers on the Adriana much good. Pushed by the BBC to condemn the now well-documented practices of the Hellenic Coast Guard, Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer Jonas Grimheden walked off the set.
Though it appears that the EU is defending the Hellenic Coast Guard, the inverse is closer to the truth: As the southeastern corner of the EU, Greece is responsible for deflecting as many migrants as possible from Europe.
“This border is not only a Greek border, it is also a European border,” declared European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen in a 2020 joint press conference with the Greek prime minister. “I thank Greece for being our European aspida in these times,” she said, using the Greek word for “shield.” Greece is between Europe and many tens of thousands of people seeking refuge from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East, and it stands astride the border wearing a mask and strapped with a combat knife. In support of this border work, the EU has funneled billions of euros to its member-state. Frontex also deploys aerial surveillance assets, its own ships, and even on-the-ground personnel who have collaborated with Greek police in the drift-back scheme.
Europe doesn’t just fund the Greek side: The European Union has sent over $10 billion worth of assistance to Turkey, a non-member state, to help guard the border. Billions more have gone to Egypt, Tunisia, and Mauritania — all with the goal of reducing the number of asylum-seekers who make it to somewhere within the EU where they can exercise their inviolable rights.
In the Western hemisphere, Mexico serves as un escudo for the United States, shielding its richer neighbor to the north.
President Joe Biden ended the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, but his June order to halt asylum processing at the southern border has had a similar effect. And under heavy pressure from the United States, Mexico adopted the cost-effective practice of pushing migrants back to the country’s own south, relying on the difficult journey to dissuade people traveling to the U.S. from Central and South America. Last month, the Associated Press reported accusations from an asylum-seeker that she was beaten by Mexican soldiers in front of her children before they were all put on a bus south. Such scenes and their direct connection to U.S.
The documentation of policies is so thorough that any denial of responsibility is highly unlikely, yet this seems to be sufficient for Biden and the international organizations to which heads of state are supposed to answer.
If Donald Trump is re-elected in November, the American crackdown on asylum will likely intensify. Like other conservative leaders, the former president has made “migrant crime” a focal point of his campaign, using it as a catch-all response in recent debates. Along with the “Remain in Mexico” policy, we can anticipate Trump reinstating Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras at the very least. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 victory plan goes a step further, suggesting a direct assault on the right to asylum itself. The authors of the plan state, “International organizations and agreements that undermine our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed. They should be abandoned.”
The schemers behind Project 2025 are correct in one aspect: it is not up to individual states to protect their borders by any means they see fit. The right to seek asylum as a refugee is legally protected by the 1951 Refugee Convention and is, in principle, one of the few guarantees of international law. Non-refoulement (the French term for “push back”) is meant to be a fundamental human right.
However, if wealthy Western countries, who are responsible for upholding international law, conspire to circumvent this rule, there is little that can be done to stop them. For instance, Hungary is currently facing a 1 million euro fine per day from the EU’s highest court for pushing back migrants, yet Prime Minister Viktor Orbán appears able to afford it, as the EU unblocked over 10 billion euros in frozen funds for Hungary’s ruling group in December. The EU’s stance is unequivocal – and clearly lawless. Investigative bodies may continue to compile reports, but there is no recourse against the decisions of armed individuals in masks.
As of now, nations are not directly challenging the Refugee Convention, even as they work to diminish and even eliminate its protections. In this climate, countries situated between the wealthiest nations and the most impoverished and war-torn ones can serve as valuable buffers and border enforcers. Every asylum-seeker turned away by Greece is one less that Germany has to accommodate.
While a world facing climate and political instability does result in more refugees, the global assault on asylum is not a byproduct of overwhelming immigration. Japan, for instance, tightened its asylum policy in June, making it easier to deport asylum-seekers, despite only granting refugee status to 303 individuals in 2024, a national record. A few hundred people in a population of over 100 million cannot realistically strain the country’s resources; the issue lies in the belief that individuals have the right to escape hardship and seek refuge. The objective is to diminish a right into a rare privilege.
To achieve this, the West must find ways to make seeking asylum even less appealing and more perilous than the conflicts and disasters people are fleeing. Authorities must devise new cruelties to impose, concoct new horrors to inflict on the world’s most desperate. With their masks, knives, and beatings, the Hellenic Coast Guard leads the way.
“There is a huge amount to learn from the Greek authorities and the Greek government in terms of the approach they’ve taken towards illegal migration,” United Kingdom Home Secretary Suella Braverman remarked after a tour of coast guard operations on Samos, an island known for push-backs. Shortly after the U.K. implemented a policy deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda, five individuals drowned in the English Channel while attempting to reach Britain, including a child.
For wealthy countries, these drownings are not a concern – they are seen as a successful policy solution. So, if you want a glimpse into the future, envision a masked individual abducting a child, placing her on a raft, and pushing it into the open sea, repeatedly. Please rephrase the following sentence.
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