with the Italian Red Cross, may use ships for the “health surveillance” period “with reference to persons rescued at sea and for whom it is not possible to indicate the “Place of Safety”. ASGI (2020b) counted that 183 migrants had been confined on “quarantine ships” between 17 April and 5 May 5. On the one hand, these two episodes partly contributed to depict migrants as potential vehicles of contagion and to spread anti-migrant racism. Yet, on the other, we caution against any linear narrative that reads the measures of preventive isolation for migrants as a signal of migrants being turned (again) into risky subjects. Rather, we contend that the confinement of migrants as potentially infected subjects is part of hygienic-sanitary bordering mechanisms and, at once, of an acceleration of the politics of containment-expulsion that happened during the lockdown. In fact, migrants have not been presented (only) as a risk for the local population: migrant confinement on the mainland and at sea has been justified as a sanitary measure for the benefit of both the population and the migrants themselves. As highlighted in a document of the Italian Parliament, many extraordinary measures were adopted “in order to guarantee that migrants are hosted and that their health is safeguarded during the pandemic emergency” (Camera dei Deputati, 2020). The same document refers simultaneously to “sanitary surveillance” and “two weeks fiduciary isolation” as compulsory measures to be taken vis-a-vis migrants who disembark in Italy. Thus, we see that security claims are intertwined and nuanced with hygienic-sanitary reasons, aimed at safeguarding migrants and citizens. Notably, the multiplication of hybrid sites of migrant confinement and of carceral geographies in the name of “health and safety” has been visible also on the mainland: for instance, in the city of Udine buses have been used for isolating migrants for two weeks (Repubblica, 2020). Thus, means of transport have been transformed into mobile containment infrastructures. Malta’s push-back and offshore detention regime “There was no pushback. This was us saving lives”, Malta’s prime minister Robert Abela said on 1 May 2020 (Deutsche Welle, 2020), about two weeks after the Maltese government had instructed a fleet of private vessels to leave Valletta harbour, pick up migrants in distress within the Maltese Search and Rescue zone, and return them to Libya (Kingsley, 2020). Among those returned were the lifeless bodies of some of the twelve migrants who had died of starvation and dehydration or drowned while being knowingly left in distress at sea for five days near Malta’s coast, observed by aerial assets of both the Armed Forces of Malta and Frontex, the EU border agency. After the return by Malta’s ‘secret fleet’, the migrant survivors found them- 10