care of asylum-seekers and to prevent them from being infected as well as from infecting EUropean citizens. This article investigates how the security-humanitarian rationale that underpins migration governmentality has been restructured by and inflected in light of hygienic-sanitary borders which enforce racialised confinement in the name of both migrants and citizens’ safety from infection by the Covid-19 virus. Hygienic-sanitary borders function, we suggest, through mechanisms of confinement, exclusion and selection which are predicated on the logic of “contain to protect” in reference to a global health threat. Focusing on the politics of migration containment along EUrope’s external frontiers, we interrogate how the pandemic has been exploited to enact deterrence through hygienic-sanitary border enforcements. These recent measures and transformations, we argue, are more than temporary responses to an unprecedented health crisis. Rather, the pandemic has been seized by EUropean states and institutions as an opportunity to strengthen existing deterrence measures and hamper migrants’ access to asylum through biopolitical and spatial tactics that aim to restructure the border regime in the long-term. While emphasising the historical trajectories and continuities underwriting these current developments, we contend that the pandemic functions as an accelerator of dynamics of migrant incarceration and containment. Indeed, the port closures enforced by Italy and Malta and the multiple border closures enacted by other EUropean member states as a response to the pandemic have to be viewed in a context of increased border securitisation, particularly since 2015’s “long summer of migration” (Kasparek and Speer, 2015). Under the mantra ‘2015 ought not repeat itself’, EUropean borders have become further securitised and militarised, arguably at an unprecedented pace. In light of this, the humanitarianisation of the (Mediterranean) border (Walters, 2010), or at least the humanitarian spectacle following migrant deaths at sea, has given way to collective EUropean irreverence toward perpetrations of anti-migrant atrocities and systematic violations of human rights. While during the military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum (2013-2014), EU member states enacted a “good scene of rescue” (AUTHOR A) and justified border controls in the name of saving lives at sea, we have now seen “a shift toward the de-humanitarianisation of the border”, as AUTHOR B ET AL point out. Given the current overt EUropean politics of migrant containment predicated upon blatant infringements of international law and human rights conventions, this article reflects on this de-humanitarianisation of borders but seeks to push the discussion further. We concur that it is fundamental to register the dehumanising treatments that migrants are targeted by and the sheer border violence enacted by EU member states. Yet, we want to suggest that the humanitarian rationale, articulated in conjunction with 2