ROME: Italy has increased transfers of migrants to a centre in Albania, a civil society organisation said Thursday, following a tightening of EU migration policy.

The costly centre is one of far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s flagship schemes to tackle illegal immigration and is being closely watched in Europe amid calls for Brussels to finance “return hubs” outside the bloc.

The centre in Gjader has stood largely empty since opening in 2024 due to a raft of legal challenges, but that may change due to new measures adopted by the European Parliament aimed at making it easier for member states to return asylum seekers to countries Europe deems “safe”.

While transfers over the past year have been small, with at most some twenty people held there at a time, it now holds around 90 people, an Italian interior ministry source said.

Giorgia Pintus, part of a delegation from the TAI Asylum and Immigration Board which visited the centre this week, said there had been two large transfers in the past two weeks. The ministry source said “the centre has always been operational. The number of people varies depending on necessity.”

Repatriation

Those being held include people suffering from psychological distress and people from countries like Iran where repatriation is “virtually impossible”, TAI said.

There are also migrants who lost their jobs and as a result their residence permits in Italy too, it said. They have access to a single telephone and must wait their turn, “which can take days”, while the time they have to speak to lawyers or families is limited, Pintus said.

Among the detainees were at least two people who had already been sent to Albania before and then returned to Italy, before being sent back again to Gjader. One is a Senegalese man with a wife and daughters in Brescia, near Milan in northern Italy, who had been detained in Albania and then released on health grounds.

“Upon returning to Italy, he resumed work as a boat painter and managed to convince his employer to regularise his status”, Pintus said. “He went to the police station on his own initiative to begin the residence permit process”, but was transferred back to Albania, she said.

Another is a Togolese man “who has been in Italy for over ten years, has a clean criminal record, and was a skilled worker at a mechanic’s”, working off the books, Pintus said. He was initially transferred to Albania but freed after an Italian court ruled in his favour. He ended up back in Albania after the mechanic refused to employ him legally.

The TAI delegation said those it spoke to had not received formal transfer orders, and denounced the “widespread use of coercive measures” during the journey from Italy to Albania. Few people held at the centre are then repatriated, it said.

Apart from five Egyptians repatriated directly via Tirana in May 2025, those few sent home were returned to Italy first, it said.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2026