legitimise such containment and restriction of people’s movement as well as their social (dis)integration, and that not in a hostile but ostensibly in a caring fashion. Conclusion Covid-19 has been characterised by a multiplication of borders and of re-bordering mechanisms (Guild, 2020). Both national frontiers and internal borders have been strengthened during the protracted lockdowns across the world in the name of “health and safety”. Within such a context, people seeking asylum in EUrope have been object of different confinement measures, enforced and justified in the name of a “contain to protect” logic. Italy and Malta’s self-declaration as unsafe harbours for people seeking asylum in EUrope during the pandemic and Greece’s discriminatory lockdown in the hotspots sheds light on some reconfigurations occurring in the EUropean border regime. As this article has shown, migrants are neither seen as mere threats nor as absolute victims: their representation has transformed in light of EUrope deeming itself too unsafe to take care of them, turning migrants into both potential Covidspreaders as well as subjects who need to be protected from EUrope. On the basis of this ambivalent humanitarian-security narrative and in the name of protecting the health of both migrants and citizens in front of a global “health threat”, migrants are targeted by hygienic-sanitary measures - being quarantined on vessels at sea, pushed-back, and restricted in their mobility and ability to access rights. These transformations contribute to reconfigure the security-humanitarian rationale in terms of hygienic-sanitary biopolitics. As we have argued in this article, the outbreak of Covid-19 did not constitute a watershed moment in the functioning of the border regime: rather, it has worked as an accelerator of changes that were meant to be implemented, some of which will presumably remain in place in the foreseeable future. How far can EUrope push the narrative of protecting migrants for their own good when the logic of deterrence is becoming ever-more explicit? Enactments of hygienic-sanitary borders are underwritten by a politics of migrant deterrence, constituted through infrastructural impediments as well as legal and administrative hurdles hampering migrants from accessing asylum and from reaching EUrope. The politics of migrant deterrence is enacted together with an escalation of hybrid sites and practices of containment and carcerality, which are currently legitimised under the guise of protection from a “global health threat”. The shift in the security-humanitarian rationale in light of a hygienicsanitary biopolitics is intertwined with a violent politics of containment that it contributes to strengthen and render more acceptable. In light of this multiple restructuring of the securityhumanitarian reason, it is key to ask what it means to mobilise a critical knowledge of the 20