come illegally, and while legality fosters health, illegality enhances the pandemic”, Marco Minniti, the former Italian Interior Minister declared. In the Italian context, this alleged nexus between the pandemic and illegality has been mobilised on many occasions to justify the preventative confinement of migrants who land in Italy. Indeed, ‘illegality’ is not narrowed to unauthorised movements but, we suggest, is conceived as a conceptual umbrella to refer to a dodgy continuum - which includes and links up the unhealthy sanitary conditions and cramped spaces in which migrants are often forced to live in, migrants’ legal status and the smuggling networks they might use. The “security continuum” which has regularly connected “border control, terrorism, international crime and migration” (Huysmans 2000: 760) as if these connections were logical or even natural, has thus become extended to include diseases and hygenic insecurity. That is, by positing a nexus between the pandemic and migrants’ illegality, state authorities do ultimately stretch the notion of illegality itself and reframe it in light of the hygienic-sanitary logics. The ‘migration problem’ in relation to Covid-19 exploded across Italy in summer 2020, mainly in light of two events. First, at the end of June in the city of Mondragone, 49 Bulgarian workers were tested positive for Covid-19 and were isolated by local authorities to prevent contagion. Local Italian citizens organised a protest in front of the quarantine area, blaming the migrant workers for bringing the virus back to that region, prompting some of the Bulgarians to flee the area. In the following days, the tension against foreign workers rapidly increased, with a few more Covid clusters being detected in migrant communities across Italy. Second, on 12 July, out of the 70 Pakistani migrants rescued at sea and disembarked in Roccella Jonica (Calabria), 28 were tested positive for the virus, the news of which triggered vehement protests by locals who did not want the infected migrants to be hosted in the area. Soon after this event, the government introduced ad hoc ferries to quarantine rescued migrants for two weeks at sea. The so called “quarantine ships”, we suggest, are part of a broader carceral geography at sea – or what Laleh Khalili poignantly calls “carceral seas” (Khalili, 2020) – formed by mobile sites of detention, tactics of migrant kidnapping and push-back operations (Tazzioli and De Genova, 2020). In fact, migrant confinement at sea, ostensibly for public health reasons, had occurred already in April. According to a national decree enforced on 12 April, the Department for Civil Liberties and Immigration of the Interior Ministry stated that, as the Italian Association of Lawyers for Immigration (ASGI, 2020a) commented on, it was entrusted “with the management of procedures related to the fiduciary isolation and quarantine of foreign citizens rescued or arrived independently by sea. On the basis of this decree, the Ministry of Interior, together 9