overall down about 31% compared to 2019 (EASO, 2021a, 2021b). The multiple restrictions that migrants encountered during the pandemic-related lockdown are the marker of a broader trend in EUropean policies seeking to prevent migrants from accessing the asylum procedure and, thus, from receiving a (temporary) right to remain in EUrope. These different obstacles are legal, administrative, and infrastructural. Besides the implementation of decrees restricting access to the asylum and to humanitarian support, migrants are targeted by ever-more restrictive and violent deterrence measures as the following subsections highlight, focusing in turn on Italy, Malta, and Greece. Italy’s sanitary containment On 7 April 2020, a few weeks after the enforcement of an emergency law in response to Covid19, the Italian government closed its ports to migrants with a decree which stated that “due to the emergency situation triggered by the pandemic [...] the Italian state cannot guarantee safe spaces” to migrants rescued at sea and that, therefore, “for the entire duration of the national sanitary emergency, the Italian ports do not match the necessary criteria to be considered a Place of Safetyv. The decision to forbid vessels from disembarking migrants in Italy did not mean full border closure, since even when the lockdown was still in place, migrants continued to land there (Alarm Phone, 2020a). Yet, although in practice Italian harbours did not turn into fully sealed borders, what interests us is Italy’s declaration to have become an unsafe country for people seeking asylum, unable to take care of them. On 12 April, another decree came into force “to guarantee the full compliance of the measures of fiduciary isolation and quarantine which have been adopted to counter the spreading of Covid-19, even towards people rescued at sea”vi. Migrants, as objects of a legal measure apt at safeguarding them from the pandemic, initially appeared not as risky subjects bringing the virus, nor as subjects at risk (Aradau, 2004), but, rather, as individuals who could not be protected and be brought to safety. Through such a self-declaration of unsafety, the Italian state exempted itself from any humanitarian obligation, in the name of migrants’ health. By mobilising that argument, the Italian government has shifted the focus from questions around rescuing/not rescuing migrants towards Italy’s nonsafety as a port and, more broadly, as a countryvii. A few months later, in summer 2020, the relative increase in the number of Covid-19 cases in Italy and the simultaneous increase of migrant arrivals by sea became an object of public debate: both right-wing parties and some politicians from the government coalition warned of a ‘migration-Covid nexus’. “This virus is mainly spread through people’s movements: tourists, businessmen, commuters, but also migrants. Migrants who come by the sea 8