Repatriation centres that do not repatriate. A paradox at the Ministry of the Interior

The government is not backing down on the CPRs – quite the contrary. “We will continue to work on creating a further 106 places in existing facilities in Sicily, Sardinia and Lazio, and we have also initiated procedures for the construction of new facilities,” announced the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, during Question Time on Wednesday. On that occasion, he announced that 2026 will be a record year for repatriations. However, the CPRs are unlikely to make much of a contribution towards this target.

Of the 4,784 forced repatriations carried out in 2025 from Italy, only 1,732 were carried out from CPRs: the majority (3,052) were carried out on people who had never even entered these centres. Repatriation centres serve little purpose in terms of repatriation, yet the number of admissions continues to rise. These figures emerge from "Expulsions: An Analysis of Italian Repatriation Policy, 2015–2025", the new report produced by ActionAid Italia and the Department of Political Science at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, published alongside an update to the "Trattenuti" open-data platform. However, in 2025, there were 6,835 new arrivals at the CPRs: a record, as the report highlights, noting that whilst the total number of forced repatriations peaked that year, those carried out by the CPRs fell by 45.1 per cent compared with 2022. The summary highlights a paradox: “More detention does not mean more repatriations,” the document states.

Throughout the Meloni government’s term, between 2022 and 2025, the increase in deportations took place largely outside the CPRs. In 2022, ten centres were operational, with 803 actual places, 6,457 admissions and 3,154 deportations preceded by detention in the CPRs. By 2025, the number of centres had risen to eleven and the number of available places to 883. Whilst total forced repatriations increased by 22.2 per cent over the same period, rising from 3,916 to 4,784, those carried out without prior detention in CPRs quadrupled, jumping from 762 to 3,052. The report emphasises that, over the entire period from 2015 to 2025, more than half of forced repatriations were carried out without prior detention in a CPR.

In the face of these paradoxical figures, the material living conditions within these facilities are often degrading and isolating, as reported by external monitoring organisations such as Emergency, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and the Migrantes Foundation. This scenario remains unchanged in 2025, when, according to calculations by ActionAid and the University of Bari, there were approximately 148 total days of deprivation of liberty for every repatriation carried out: more than double the average for the period 2018–2024.

But there is also an economic cost. The report indicates that, in recent years, the ratio between the cost of managing CPRs and the number of repatriations actually carried out has worsened. Between 2018 and 2025, expenditure on the detention system – including CTRAs, detention centres for asylum seekers undergoing border procedures – amounts to at least 217.1 million euros. The three-year period 2023–2025 alone (during which returns from the centres fell by 42 per cent) accounts for 66.2 per cent of total expenditure over the eight years under consideration. More specifically, considering only the CPRs on Italian territory, between 2023 and 2025 total expenditure rose by 40.5 per cent, whilst expenditure on management and routine maintenance alone rose by 45.7 per cent. If, on the other hand, we consider only expenditure on the management and routine maintenance of CPRs, the cost of detention required to carry out a repatriation from these centres rises from €4,265 to €11,855 (+178 per cent).

The Ministry of the Interior, however, insists on the CPRs. “We will continue to work on making a further 106 places available in existing facilities in Sicily, Sardinia and Lazio, and we have also initiated procedures for the construction of new facilities: one in Campania, two in Trentino-Alto Adige, one in Calabria, one in Tuscany and one in Emilia-Romagna,” explained Piantedosi in the Chamber. However, while detention may be justified on the grounds that it is instrumental to repatriation, the ActionAid report goes on to state, “its expansion should be accompanied by evidence that it yields an additional operational benefit. The available data do not consistently show such a correlation”.

On the European front, the trend is the same. Yesterday, the European Union’s Home Affairs Council gave its final go-ahead to new rules for the ‘more effective return’ of people without the legal right to remain in the EU. The rules, which will come into force in the coming weeks, supplement the Pact on Migration and Asylum and ‘will contribute to its effective implementation’. Stricter rules are envisaged for the return of those who pose “a threat to security”, and Member States are also being offered the option of establishing return centres in non-EU countries.

The CPR “does not create ‘repatriability’”, the report notes. Key factors include a lack of consular cooperation, the failure of documents to arrive, and the absence of effective operational channels. The true usefulness of CPRs is therefore “contingent upon factors external to detention itself”. Increasing the number of available places means increasing the state’s capacity to detain, “but not necessarily its capacity to repatriate”.