Winter puts Italian Prime Minister's plan to deport illegal migrants on hold

One of the flagship and most controversial measures of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is her policy plans aimed at the deportation of migrants to detention centers located in Albania.

However, low temperatures and bad weather have put Meloni's plans on hold. In the winter months, the mild temperatures of the Mediterranean slow the arrival of migrants coming by boat to the island of Lampedusa.

Italy has built a 70,000-square-metre detention center in Gjäder, a town in northwestern Albania, over the past year. It is currently empty because there are no migrants to be transferred.

The Interior Ministry confirmed with Spanish news outlet El País that all police officers, prison officials, and administrative staff have returned to Italy, although the center remains active and is staffed at varying levels according to their requirements. Only seven employees remain

At Italy's migrant center in Shëngjin, an hour from the Albania capital city of Tirana, and at the country's Gjäder camp, which was designed to hold 1,000 inmates, more than a hundred officers and employees do not have assigned tasks and are staying in a five-star hotel in a tourist area, El País reported.

Italian courts have rejected two attempts by Meloni to transfer a group of migrants to deportation centers in Albania and have demanded that the far-right leader allow these migrants to stay in Italy.

The court in Rome in charge of the case has referred it to the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU). Meloni is waiting for a ruling of this court to resolve the conflict between Italian and European regulations.

In order to comply with international law, Italy can only send healthy adult men with no physical or psychological vulnerabilities whore are rescued in international waters by ships flying the Italian flag to Albania,

Some migrants deported to Albania by Meloni came from Egypt and Bangladesh, countries considered safe by the Italian government.

However, a recent European ruling reduced the list of safe countries, excluding almost all nationalities arriving in Italy by sea, such as those from Egypt and Bangladesh.

The exorbitant cost of Meloni's plan to send migrants abroad to Italy's recently built detention centers in Albania has been criticized. The large detention center at Gjadër will cost €800,000,000 euros ($846,148,000 dollars) over five years.

The Italian press has estimated that given only 24 people were transferred to migrant centers recently, transferees who were then returned to Italy by court order days later, the cost per migrant amounted to €85,600 euros
($90,000 dollars)

A group of parliamentarians traveled to Italy's deportation centers in Albania in October 2024 to monitor them.

Italian Member of Parliament (MP) Riccardo Magi said the migrant centers were akin to "a prison colony, shameful and absurd, and they have all the characteristics of a concentration camp" according to a Google translation of comments he made that were quoted by the Italian news outlet La Sexta

Faced with the increasing arrival of migrants, the European Union wants to protect itself and for the first time has opened centers outside EU territory to control the flow of migration into the economic and political bloc. Some EU countries are studying Meloni's model as a solution, while others remain skeptical.

Lampedusa, one of the Italian islands closest to North Africa, remains the main arrival point for refugees in the central Mediterranean in 2024, with more than 30,000 migrants arriving each year, according to UNHCR and UNICEF.

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