Eurasia Press & News
The issue of migrant smuggling networks remains highly relevant, with the Western Mediterranean route seeing an increase in activity in 2026.
Human smugglers operate as decentralized networks, consisting of recruiters, drivers, safe houses, small boat crews, document forgers, financial handlers, and ‘sales’ people.
Digital technologies, including social media platforms and encrypted messaging applications, are used widely to recruit and promote crossings.
The broader criminal ties of human smuggling networks to gangs and other larger criminal organizations in Europe show the convergence of human, drug, and weapons smuggling.Migrant smuggling to Europe remains a lucrative illicit industry and continues to pose a significant security challenge, requiring law enforcement to keep pace with smugglers’ rapid adaptation to countermeasures. In the context of the European Union, smugglers were estimated to be responsible for more than 90 percent of irregular migrant entries around 2016. Sovereignty, security, and humanitarian concerns collide in this issue set: European frontline states cannot identify who enters their countries and ultimately lose control of their borders to criminal organizations, while the latter profit from migrants’ vulnerability as they seek to reach the continent.?The issue of migrant smuggling networks remains highly relevant: while arrivals have declined, deaths on the Central Mediterranean route have risen sharply. Across all routes, Frontex recorded roughly 49,000 detections of irregular crossings in the first half of 2026.
Human smugglers operate as decentralized networks, consisting of recruiters, drivers, safe houses, small boat crews, document forgers, financial handlers, and ‘sales’ people. According to Europol, leadership and key operatives in these smuggling networks are often based outside the EU, where they remotely maintain control and command, rendering arrests within the Union largely ineffective and making low-level operatives easily replaceable. Overall, different networks and groups have dominated different smuggling routes into Europe, though inter-network rivalry, in which networks vie for people to bring over, appears to continue. The Western Mediterranean route grew 66 percent in 2026 in terms of arrivals in Spain, according to International Organization for Migration (IOM) figures for January to April. The rise is driven mainly by sea departures from Algeria, with Algerians accounting for 42 percent of arrivals on this route and 22 percent for Moroccans.
Separately, a mass land crossing, primarily by Moroccan nationals, at Ceuta in July drew tens of thousands of people and killed at least 67, many drowning during the crossing. The surge was driven by the reframing of a Spanish Supreme Court ruling online as a certainty that Spain would grant legal status. Both European and Spanish authorities linked that deceptive framing to human smuggler networks online. Recognizing the importance of the information environment in irregular migration after the Ceuta crisis, the European Commission has compelled social media platforms to strengthen fact-checking, and wants to “set up a mechanism helping the platforms to better cooperate with local fact-checkers.” Crossings from eastern Libya to Crete have increased significantly as well, notably in 2025. The success of this route highlights how well networks can circumvent countermeasures: smugglers around Tobruk exploit a stretch of water that falls right outside routine surveillance.
Human smuggling to Europe has naturally evolved with the rise of digital technologies. Law enforcement interdictions increasingly cite social media platforms, messaging applications, and cryptocurrency payments as part of migrant journeys through smuggler facilitation. Smugglers use social networks for various purposes, including recruiting personnel such as drivers, and advertising upcoming trips to migrants seeking to cross to Europe. Violence is part and parcel of the operational method of these networks, with kidnapping and torture frequently used against migrants and their families in transit countries to extort money. In addition, migrants are sometimes forced to work off debts to their smugglers. Rivalry between smuggling networks has led to significant violence, and has often been intertwined with larger gang affiliations.
For smugglers, moving migrants to Europe has often become but one of their ‘services’. Increasingly, smugglers seek to optimize revenue by mixing and combining migrant, drug, and weapon smuggling. Human smuggling networks have deep ties with criminal groups across Europe. In one operation — taking place on June 16 and made public on August 7 — led by Spanish authorities and supported by Europol, one of the largest criminal networks smuggling migrants, weapons, cannabis, synthetic drugs, and fugitives was dismantled. The group operated a true empire, and police made 78 arrests, 77 in Spain and one in Algeria, including three high-value targets, and seized 18 boats, including so-called “ghost speedboats” used to evade detection. According to authorities, this group moved more than 2,000 people and earned over €24 million in profits. The arrested individuals had ties to criminal groups across Europe and to larger organizations such as the “Mocro Mafia,” a loose criminal network known to dominate the European cocaine trade.
Europe’s apparatus to counter this issue mirrors the inherent complexity of a transnational security challenge that has ramifications for the entire bloc. From a legal perspective, the Commission has proposed replacing a 2002 package of rules that criminalize aiding illegal entry into the EU with a version that also criminalizes “public instigation,” but the proposal has stalled, and Parliament has yet to adopt a position. The more active front has been police-led action. The Pact on Migration and Asylum now guides much of this work. Europol’s European Centre Against Migrant Smuggling — established in March 2026 as the successor to the 2016 European Migrant Smuggling Centre, with significant financial and human resources — has become a hub for coordinating smuggling data across the continent. Additionally, the Eurojust-hosted JITs Network Secretariat supports joint investigation teams, enabling joint prosecution of transnational networks.
Last month, the Commission and the High Representative proposed an EU-wide sanctions regime aimed at migrant smuggling. In practice, this would enable asset freezes and travel bans on these networks. Because these measures would also serve to reach people outside EU jurisdiction — i.e., the leadership — it would address the command-and-control problem that arrests inside the Union consistently fail to tackle.
Frontex, the EU’s border agency, has also played a role in the fight against smuggling, collecting intelligence on smuggling routes, conducting surveillance, and sharing data with Europol. Nonetheless, the European Court of Auditors assessed it in 2021 as insufficiently effective, despite a rapid budget increase. Outsourcing mechanisms that provide financial resources to transit countries such as Türkiye, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Mauritania, and Morocco to prevent EU-bound departures have also been used to varying degrees of success. After Mauritania intensified interceptions in 2024, with increased parallel Moroccan patrols, arrivals via the Atlantic route to Spain’s Canary Islands plummeted.?However, according to Frontex, such measures also seem to simply displace the phenomenon rather than eliminate it: “[S]tricter controls in Morocco and on the neighbouring Western African and Central Mediterranean routes have pushed more departures towards Algerian shores.”
Another challenge in countering human smuggling is that smugglers have become agile and quick to shift routes in response to countermeasures and detection risks. One recent case features a complex smuggling from Vietnam, with migrants entering the Schengen area on short-term visas through Hungary before flying to France and on towards the United Kingdom, raking in millions. Smuggling networks to Europe thus also operate from farther afield than Europe’s immediate neighborhood. Another example comes from South Asia, where Pakistani interventions against Europe-bound flows built out by smuggling networks have decreased irregular Pakistani migration but also have led to new routes through Azerbaijan, Malaysia, and Egypt. Belarus is also known as a route for migrants but belongs to a different category of immigration-related threats: for Minsk, weaponized immigration serves as a hybrid attack against Europe, a lever in its relations with the Bloc.
While irregular migration and human smuggling to Europe have significantly decreased year-over-year, a lucrative and dangerous illicit enterprise persists, profiting from migrants’ desperation and maintaining deep ties to known criminal organizations in Europe. The Ceuta crisis has painfully reinforced the importance of the digital information environment in irregular migration and now offers a key point for intervention and disruption. Europe has a security and humanitarian imperative to use all instruments, including sanctions, to continue to disrupt these opportunistic, profit-driven networks.
