Under the Covid-19 pandemic, the humanitarian border has become reconfigured along and inflected by hygienic-sanitary rationales. By speaking of hygienic-sanitary logics we refer to modes of confinement enforced and justified in the name of a “contain to protect” principle in front of a global “health threat”. As we will illustrate in section II, this has been the case with Italy and Malta’s denial of disembarkation to migrants in order to protect them and Italian and Maltese citizens from exposure to Covid-19, as well as at Greek hotspots where differential lockdowns were implemented in the name of not exposing asylum-seekers and Greek locals to the virus. Yet, by speaking of a reconfiguration here, we do not mean that securitisation processes and the crafting of migrants at sea as subjects of piety and threat are no longer at play. Indeed, both of these migrant representations continue to shape EUropean policies of migration containment and provide the ethical and political ground for interventions by states and nonstate actors (as well as, in some cases, their refusal to intervene). Nonetheless, we are interested in highlighting how security and humanitarian reasons have been rearticulated during the Covid-19 pandemic around and in light of hygienic-sanitary predicaments. We suggest that this rearticulation of the politics of migration containment has given rise to what we refer to as hygienic-sanitary biopolitics, predicted on a “contain to protect” logic and in the name of combating a global health threat. Section II: Obstructing access to asylum and mobility under Covid-19 The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in EUrope has triggered a series of political, administrative, and legal transformations in the governance of migration and borders. Although the World Health Organisation (2020) advised “against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks”, national border closures and the temporary suspension of freedom of movement within the Schengen Area were quickly implemented from March 2020 onward, changing the EUropean landscape in the span of a few weeks and fragmenting the image of EUrope as a smooth space of ‘free’ mobility (Guild, 2020). Mobility restrictions along EUrope’s external borders remained severe and subjected to uneven border closures. According to the European Commission (2020), the external border would function “as a security perimeter for all Schengen States” so that guarding it would be “of common interest and a common responsibility”, even an opportunity to display “concerted action among Member States to limit the global spread of the virus.” Despite EUropean intensifications in border security, ostensibly responding to a health emergency, and the overall decline in international trans-border travel, precarious migrant movements toward EU member states have continued. Although, overall, migrant movements 6