Good morning from Brussels, Increasing calls for better external border protection and improving the returns of irregular migrants suggest an enhanced role for Frontex, the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency. Commissioner-designate for Internal Affairs and Migration Magnus Brunner’s recent written responses to the EU Parliament’s LIBE committee show that he would back the proposal to triple Frontex's standing corps to 30,000. Brunner wants Frontex to better assist member states with returns, become more heavily involved in operations in third countries, and give a “stronger” response to hybrid threats at EU borders. All of these would need an amendment to the Frontex regulation. However, Anastasia Karatzas, a policy analyst at the European Policy Center, told Euractiv’s Nicoletta Ionta that a financial boost of the organisation should be accompanied by sufficient oversight mechanisms too. But the agency has to face a string of accusations, including involvement in illegal pushbacks, ignoring those in distress, complicity in abusive and arbitrary detention, and more. When recently asked by Euractiv whether safeguards had been put in place to protect against further issues of this kind, a Commission spokesperson refused to be drawn. While its former director and now MEP Fabrice Leggeri was forced to resign in 2022, concerns remain over the continuance of these issues and what an enhanced role and more boots on the ground could mean in practice. | 