11 April 2026
In a keynote address at Médecins Sans Frontières‘General Assembly in Italy, the GDP’s Executive Director issued a stark warning: immigration detention is not only expanding worldwide—it is becoming more punitive, less accountable, and increasingly detached from basic human rights standards.
Alongside panellists Stefano Anastasia (the Guarantor for the rights of detainees for the Lazio Region), Maurizio Veglio (an attorney specialised in immigration law and member of the Association for Legal Studies on Immigration), and Lucia Borruso (Medical Coordinator at MSF), GDP Executive Director Michael Flynn traced the steady growth of immigration detention as a tool of migration control globally. For decades, he explained, immigration detention has been expanding across much of the world and today, it is nearly universal–with the notable exception of South America. But what we are witnessing today, he stressed, is something qualitatively different: a system “supercharged and unleashed from human rights and humanitarian norms.”
Pointing to the Trump administration’s aggressive expansion of immigration detention and efforts to externalise migration control to third countries–as well as to Italy’s establishment of detention facilities in Albania, Australia’s offshore detention practices, and Brussels’ support for migrant interdiction across North Africa–Flynn argued that these policies reflect a shared logic: “how can we the privileged nations of the world shield ourselves from our humanitarian responsibilities and shift that burden beyond our borders?”
Flynn identified three structural features of immigration detention that enable its abuse and expansion:
First, people in immigration detention typically are not charged with crimes and thus are not afforded the full protection of the law. Instead this detention is defined as an “administrative” measure to ensure a person’s removal or to perform other migration procedures. In some countries detention is imposed without any legal regulation, as an ad hoc “off the books” enforcement tool. Immigration detainees are thus often not afforded crucial procedural guarantees like individualised case assessment, access to a lawyer, or the right to contest their detention. Many countries refuse to recognise this as detention at all, blocking independent access to centres and detainees.
Second, immigration detainees are generally not supposed to return to the societies where they are detained. Unlike prisons, which are intended—at least nominally—to teach lessons to prepare people to re-enter public life, immigration detention centres have no reform agenda because most people who enter them are to be permanently removed. Consequently, there is little motivation to ensure accountability, implement costly reforms, or safeguard basic standards.
And third, countries often hide or disguise their immigration detention practices. During the GDP’s nearly 20 years of research into immigration detention systems, we have found that with few exceptions countries either fail to provide comprehensive data and reporting on their detention systems, or actively seek to prevent monitoring of their immigration sites. This lack of transparency extends across both wealthy and developing regions. An important explanation for this failure is that immigration detention often violates important universal norms, including the right to liberty.
A Path Forwards
Despite the bleak outlook, the address concluded with a clear call to action. Meaningful change, Flynn argued, will depend on three key efforts:
- We must work tirelessly to bring harmful practices to light and to reveal the inherent arbitrariness of immigration detention.
- We must develop evidence that can be used to mobilise protections that extend beyond local jurisdictions, focusing on universal human rights norms and drawing global attention to local problems.
- We must empower those who have lived through immigration detention–or who are most vulnerable to it–to document it, report it, and be the leading voices for change.
