member states as anti-Covid 19 measures, showing that migrants did not stop coming to EUrope during the lockdown but that they were, rather, hampered from getting access to the EUropean asylum system. We move on by focusing on decisions taken by Italy and Malta to declare their ports ‘unsafe’ due to the pandemic, and, further, by examining discriminatory lockdowns in refugee camps in Greece. Building on these empirical cases, our third section conceptualises what we term hygienic-sanitary borders, thus the ways in which border enforcements have emerged under Covid-19 that use ‘health and safety’ rationales to contain and deter migrants, seemingly for their own protection. Section I: : Deterrence Humanitarianism under Covid-19 Over the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in EUrope, an ambivalent security-humanitarian narrative on migration has been crafted, beyond the representation of migrants as violent threats or absolute victims. On the one hand, EU member states have turned the logics of securitisation upside down, designating themselves as unsafe environments, unable to provide assistance, protection, and safe spaces to vulnerable people seeking asylum, who were portrayed as being at risk of infection within EUrope. On the other hand, migrants and asylumseekers were depicted as potential vehicles of contagion - ‘Corona spreaders’ - reminiscent of the time of the 2014 Ebola outbreak when migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea were referred to as “Trojan horses of Ebola” (Iaccino 2014). As part of this ambivalent narrative, the very notion of threat has become redefined: first, not in individual terms but at the level of the group and population - e.g. the group of migrants who land on the EUropean coasts; and second, in that migrants are crafted less as dangerous or dodgy individuals - for example as potential terrorists ‘slipping in’ (AUTHOR B) - and more as threatening virus-bearers. Border enforcement measures were underwritten by this ambivalent narrative. Ultimately, mechanisms of re-bordering are not a novelty of Covid-19: as Alison Bashford has retraced, historically “infectious disease has been central to the political, legal and commercial history of nationalism, colonialism and internationalism, as well as to the twentieth-century of a newly imagined space called ‘the world’ (Bashford, 2006: 1). As we discuss later in the article, border practices in key migration landing points in EUrope - Italy, Malta and Greece – revealed a shift in the security-humanitarian rationale which consists in twisting the protection discourse by arguing that states are no longer able to take care of migrants and to provide a safe environment to them. When taking into account such current transformations of the EUropean border regime in light of Covid-19, has the “humanitarian border” (Walters 2011) itself been reconfigured? What does ‘humanitarian’ mean in the current Mediterranean migration 4