transformations. In fact, ours is a situated analysis, which draws attention to both contingent changes and to more long standing border restructurings, analysing one in light of the other and vice versa. Focusing on the current context, Umut Ozguc argues that “detention centres, ships, islands and camps, operate as immunitary dispositif. These sites protect the existent immobility and future mobility of those ‘trusted bodies’ from the risk of contamination by refugees, asylum-seekers or unwanted immigrants” (Ozguc, 2020). Yet, we suggest that on the one hand the racialised containment of unwanted mobility through a mobile “enforcement archipelago” (Mountz, 2011) is not something new, even if nowadays hybrid sites of migration confinement have multiplied. On the other, it is worth noticing that during the pandemic migrants have not only been confined to protect citizens: they have been object of more ambivalent hygienic measures of containment, apt at protecting both them and the citizens. In fact, these measures can be defined as “hygienic” since they entail a series of “health and safety” protocols and are justified in the name of migrants’ and citizens’ protection. Second, by speaking of hygienic-sanitary borders, we draw attention to an ambivalent security-humanitarian rationale, centred around the impossibility of granting protection to the migrants and, at once, the multiplication of measures of migration containment. That is, we do not see hygienic-sanitary measures as simply protective borders against different external threats; rather, they are deployed for multiplying the obstructions towards migrants - in the name both of their protection, or better of the impossibility to protect them, and of migrants considered vehicles of contagion. This hygienic-sanitary dimension of the borders enforced during the pandemic should not be confused with forms of “medical humanitarianism” (Sharaoui, 2020). Abramowitz and colleagues define medical humanitarianism as “the provision of biomedical, public health, and epidemiological services in conditions of emergency or crisis” (Abramowitz et al. 2015: 1). In migration scholarship, medical humanitarianism is framed in terms of the centrality medical logics and criteria play in selecting and governing people seeking asylum (Pallister-Wilkins, 2015; Williams, 2016). Unlike medical humanitarianism, hygienic-sanitary biopolitics is not about medical rationales used for selecting, excluding or blocking migrants but, rather, about hygienic protocols that establish lists of safe and unsafe spaces, conducts, and actions. More precisely, if under medical humanitarianism migrants who are deemed to be vulnerable or sick might get access to protection, hygienic-sanitary borders confine precisely those who potentially can be sick, and therefore, contagious. Hence, by insisting on the peculiarity of hygienic-sanitary biopolitics with respect to medical humanitarianism, we also draw attention to key transformations that occur within the 17