rationales of securitisation, persists and continues to play a crucial role in enforcing and justifying migrant containment. More than a detractive trend towards ‘less’ humanitarianism, we need to better understand how humanitarian logics are reconfigured through their deployment by states in violent border enforcement measures seeking to contain migration. In order to do so, we explore how humanitarianism has been inflected through hygienic-sanitary logics and combined with deterrence measures apt at preventively disrupting migrants’ access to rights, asylum and to EUropean territory. In particular, we draw attention to what we call deterrence humanitarianism, meaning interventions by states, regional actors as well as international organisations that while aiming to hamper migrant mobilities, especially those toward EUrope, and access to rights, are underpinned and justified by humanitarian rationales - primarily the saving of migrant lives at risk. In doing so, we wonder: How are long-standing humanitarian discourses and logics around the protection of vulnerable migrants being reconfigured during this ongoing Covid-19 pandemic? What does the self-designation by EUropean states as being ‘unsafe’ tell us about the biopolitics of migration governance? And how are humanitarian discourses differently mobilised to support push-back and deterrence operations targeting migrants in distress in the Mediterranean? This article contributes to critical migration scholarship (Anderson, 2017; Casas-Cortes et al., 2015; AUTHOR B) and to critical security studies which deals with the entanglements of humanitarianism and security in migration governmentality (Aradau, 2004; Walters, 2011) by advancing a twofold argument. First, it contends that the pandemic has accelerated ongoing trends in the politics of migration containment, justifying them as necessary responses for both migrants and citizens’ safety. Second, it suggests that security-humanitarian logics are nowadays inflected in hygienic-sanitary terms. That is, migrants are targeted as potential virusspreaders and, at once, as individuals to be confined and restricted in movement for their own good in front of a global “health threat”, while EUropean states assert that they lack capacity to grant safe spaces to them during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methodologically this article builds on official state documents, NGO reports, and empirical material collected by one of us in Greece.ii Our article proceeds in three sections. We start by conceptualising the ongoing politics of containment enacted in the name of anti-Covid-19 measures. We contend that the securitisation and humanitarisation of migration governance are re-crafted through hygienic-sanitary biopolitical logics that seek to confine migrants and refugees both for their own good and in order to protect citizens. The second section analyses the multiple border closures enforced by 3