What the EU’s new commissioner overseeing migration policy lacks in experience on the issue, he makes up for by coming from a country pushing for stronger border security.
Magnus Brunner, who stepped down as Austria’s finance minister to become the commissioner for internal affairs and migration, also has the backing of the European People’s Party’s (EPP) influential leader, Manfred Weber.
“Winning back control of our borders is an extremely important issue,” Weber, president of the EPP, said in September. "That’s why it’s good to have an EPP member in the lead.”
All signs point to more money and resources going to Frontex, the EU’s border force.
For her second mandate, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, also a member of the EPP, has proposed increasing the number of Frontex guards to 30,000 and securing additional deals with third countries to manage migration.
This tougher stance reflects a broader political shift within the EU, particularly in the European Parliament, where far-right gains have pushed more moderate parties into hawkish positions on migration.
Anti-migrant voices have seized on Frontex data reporting a record 390,000 irregular entries into the EU in 2023. This is the highest figure since 2016 but still only accounts for about six per cent of all migration into the bloc that year.
Frontex: from afterthought to goliath
“Every time there was a crisis at Europe’s border, politicians called for a strengthening of Frontex,” Florian Trauner, dean of the Brussels School of Governance, tells The Parliament.
Frontex began as a modest operation in 2005, with a budget of €6m and a staff of 43 people. It has since ballooned to become the EU’s largest agency, a transformation driven by the influx of more than one million people who sought asylum in the EU in 2015.
Brunner takes on the role with a budget nearing €1bn and enhanced powers, including the authority to organise deportation flights. Despite the current call to expand border guard numbers to 30,000, Frontex has yet to reach an earlier target of 10,000 set by Von der Leyen at the start of her first mandate in 2019.
With greater power comes greater responsibility – and controversy. A European Parliament investigation in 2021 criticised Frontex for failing to protect human rights at the EU’s borders.
The fallout led to the resignation of the agency’s executive director, Fabrice Leggeri, who has since joined the EP as a lawmaker in the far-right Patriots for Europe group.
While no direct evidence found Frontex responsible for carrying out migrant pushbacks, the agency was criticised for systemic failures in preventing, monitoring or addressing violations by national authorities during its operations.
In response, Frontex has said it will boost the use of surveillance technology. The agency is looking to procure €400m worth of cameras, drones and other monitoring equipment to patrol the bloc’s 82,000 km of land and sea borders.
This expansion has prompted calls for greater oversight and transparency.
A promise of transparency
“The European Parliament can and should exert serious control over Frontex’s budget. It should be a place of a public forum on accountability,” Trauner says.
Following the 2021 outcry, the European Parliament voted to freeze part of Frontex’s 2022 budget. MEPs demanded the recruitment of 20 fundamental rights monitors and the establishment of a system to support this work.
Hans Leijtens, Frontex’s head since 2023, has pledged to rebuild trust by instilling a “transparency culture.”
“On the face of it, there’s some superficial improvement,” Chris Jones, the executive director of Statewatch, an EU civil-liberties NGO, tells The Parliament.
While Frontex has started releasing more information about its activities, Jones says that it still mainly reflects what the agency wants the public to see.
Earlier this year, the General Court of the European Union ruled that Frontex was wrong to withhold over 100 photographs related to its role in a human rights violation in the Mediterranean. The case centred on Frontex’s refusal to disclose 73 documents detailing its collaboration with the Libyan Coast Guard and its alleged involvement in an illegal pushback at sea.
Frontex argued that releasing the information could compromise its operations.
“Twenty letters of concern were written about possible involvement of Frontex officers in abuse and violence during operations in Macedonia, where they had no legal right to be,” Jones says. “When asked about this, the agency said nothing was put on file because these operations supposedly never happened.”
Trauner notes that oversight of the agency, including its Fundamental Rights Officer (FRO) and a complaints system, works largely independently, but may struggle to keep pace with Frontex’s rapid growth.
“The largest, most well-funded agency right now is still largely unchecked,” Dr Mariana Gkliati, a migration and asylum law professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, tells The Parliament. “What we see now is fragments of accountability and a loose compilation of different accountability mechanisms, which cannot secure a sufficient standard of accountability in practice.”
Any strengthening of Frontex will be part of negotiations for the next Multiannual Financial Framework, the EU’s budget for 2028 until 2034. In the meantime, Frontex has reported a drop in irregular border crossings this year – thanks, in part, to increased securitisation of the bloc’s external borders.