Greece’s ‘war on Roma’ is Europe’s new blueprint for discrimination

By Jonathan LeeJonathan Lee is a Romani activist from Wales, working at the European Roma Rights Centre.Published On 18 Jun 202618 Jun 2026SaveSharefacebookxwhatsapp-strokecopylinkAcross Europe, the line between internal policing and border enforcement is becoming increasingly blurred, writes Lee [File: Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters]For the Romani families living in Nea Zoi, an informal neighbourhood near Aspropyrgos, Greece, the pre-dawn hum of surveillance drones has become a regular soundtrack to their lives. By daybreak, K-9 units and tactical police have blocked narrow dirt roads, police in riot gear have formed a perimeter around the neighbourhood, and armed officers are breaking through doors to makeshift homes, all under the banner of “public order”.Since late 2025, this routine has repeated with terrifying regularity: at least 76 raids in six months, involving 473 officers, targeting 152 Romani communities across Greece. That amounts to more than one raid a week throughout the country. Documented by the European Roma Rights Centre as the most extensive anti-Roma police operation in decades, these actions are presented by Greek politicians as a tactical response to organised crime. But the pattern of police violence represents something more sinister: a strategic convergence of migration control, border security and domestic policing that criminalises Romani life.In examining the mechanics of the so-called “Operation ENTOS”, meaning “from within”, in the context of other anti-Roma actions in Europe, it becomes clear that Greece is only the sharp edge of a continent-wide shift in policy that treats racialised minorities not as citizens, but as internal threats to be managed, contained and erased. Greece has become the laboratory for this dangerous new experiment in European governance, and Athens is providing the blueprint for a preventive policing model that threatens the fundamental rights of marginalised communities across the entire European Union and beyond.The ‘preventive policing’ blueprintThe language used by authorities is carefully chosen to bypass legal scrutiny. You will not find the word “Roma” in official Greek police briefings regarding Operation ENTOS. Instead, officials speak of “socially homogeneous groups”and “hotspots of illegality”. This bureaucratic euphemism allows the state to sidestep anti-discrimination laws while explicitly targeting specific neighbourhoods. This is not a Greek innovation; it is an increasingly common legislative sleight-of-hand. Just as Slovenia criminalised “illegal gatherings”, a provision wielded almost exclusively against Romani neighbourhoods, and Italy targeted homeless Romani women through its security decree, Greece has done the same on a mass scale. Such measures use neutral terminology to dress ethnic targeting in the vocabulary of public order, creating a legal architecture for collective punishment that is supposedly insulated from accusations of discrimination.The merging of the frontier and the interiorAcross Europe, the line between internal policing and border enforcement is becoming increasingly blurred, a trend accelerated by the EU’s Migration Pact, adopted in 2024 and implemented from June 2026. This EU legislation accelerates an already present trend by blurring the lines between border control and internal law enforcement to allow for a police model that closely resembles the activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in the United States. By mandating that member states integrate asylum procedures with domestic policing, the EU is effectively exporting “border logic” to the interior of its nations.Roma and other racialised minorities are once again on the receiving end of this tactic, and the fringes of a Roma-majority neighbourhood are increasingly treated like an “internal border”, subjected to the same militarised surveillance, collective punishment and rapid displacement previously reserved mostly for migrants arriving at the borders of Europe.Drones hovering over children playing in the street; dawn raids without individual warrants; dogs straining on leashes used to menace families. These are all tactics usually confined to the frontier, now standard procedure in the Roma-majority neighbourhoods of Greece. The operation even uses the recruitment of “special guards” from within the communities themselves to assist in information gathering, a strategy straight from the colonial playbook that fractures social cohesion and encourages vulnerable residents to inform on their own neighbours and relatives.Using ‘crime’ to justify racismThe stated justification for Operation ENTOS, according to the Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, is “to prevent and control criminality without tolerating ‘special zones’ that exist beyond the law”. The now familiar sentence used in every police press release after a raid on a Romani neighbourhood is: “Targeted police operations were carried out with the aim of reinforcing the sense of security of citizens, preventing and tackling crime.”The rhetoric of “tackling crime” has served as a convenient and dangerous mask for anti-Roma actions in Europe for over a century. From France’s 1912-2017 mandate forcing travellers to carry special ID cards, to the Nazi-era fabrication of Roma as an “asocial criminal element” used to justify genocide, the pattern is consistent. Modern politicians continue this legacy: from Italy’s 2008 “Nomad Emergency”, which suspended legal protections for Roma in the name of security, to the far-right law-and-order rhetoric of Hungary’s Mi Hazánk party and France’s National Rally. These historical threads converge in Greece with mass police operations against alleged organised Romani crime. Athens’s framing of Romani communities as “hotspots of illegality” applies one of the oldest tropes in Europe’s racist playbook, updated with drones and data.Conflating Romani identity with criminality creates a narrative that positions harsh policing, forced evictions and exclusionary policies as necessary for public safety rather than as illegal ethnic targeting. This crime rhetoric also serves as a tool for spatial cleansing. Framing Roma-majority living areas as lawless zones mirrors the justification used across Europe to clear land for investment and modernisation. The “security” narrative serves a dual purpose: it suspends due process to facilitate immediate eviction, and it erases marginalised populations from the urban landscape to pave the way for gentrification. Since the 1990s, Greek authorities have conducted repeated “clean-up” operations involving forced evictions under the guise of public order, many of which were carried out to make way for development projects, including commercial zones, infrastructure projects, sports facilities and even the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.Before it becomes the standardWhat makes Operation ENTOS particularly alarming, beyond its scale and cruelty, is the stark absence of international scrutiny. Until now, there has been no significant English-language coverage of this systematic campaign. The European Roma Rights Centre holds the only comprehensive dataset of the raids, gathered not from any government or international institution, but painstakingly from local activists and careful analysis of police press releases.At the same time, the silence from Brussels is deeply troubling. As the EU pushes for stricter border controls, it appears to be turning a blind eye to these policies being weaponised against its own citizens. If this campaign proceeds without condemnation, as it looks set to do, it will set a dangerous blueprint for similar operations across the continent.The word fascism is sometimes used too loosely these days. But when a state uses its monopoly on violence to treat its own citizens as invaders in their own homes based on ethnicity, it crosses a line. Whether we call this authoritarian drift or something darker, the result is the same: the normalisation of the idea that some lives are disposable and the acceptance of a troubling new norm on the road to anti-democratic politics. In such times, to be silent is not only to be complicit but to be negligent. The price of looking the other way now will be too high for our democracies later, when such tactics inevitably expand to affect more and more people in our society. For the Roma in Nea Zoi in Aspropyrgos, the drones and dogs will return. It is up to us to make sure that this time, someone is watching.