Hans Leijtens

The European Union's border agency Frontex said on Thursday it will triple the number of its officers in Bulgaria from next month to help stem the amount of people crossing into the bloc from Turkey.

Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, is set to bolster border security in Bulgaria by dispatching between 500 and 600 of its personnel to the country, announced the agency's director during a visit to Bulgaria. The move aims to address migrant pressure and enhance border protection along the Bulgarian-Turkish and Bulgarian-Serbian borders.

Irregular immigration to the EU from Western Africa rose more than ten times on the year in January, according to the bloc's Frontex border agency, which expects overall arrivals to grow in 2024 and says halting the movement of people completely is impossible.

There is a significant increase in the number of illegal border crossings in the EU for 2023, totaling around 380,000, with a rise in arrivals from the Mediterranean Sea. This was announced by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency ("Frontex").

European Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly on Wednesday opened an own-initiative inquiry aimed at clarifying the role of Frontex, the European border control agency, in search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea following the drowning of hundreds of people in international waters off the coast of Greece on June 14. 

The European Union's border agency is seeking "clarifications and information" from Greece's coast guard on two alleged cases of migrants who crossed by boat being illegally deported back to Turkey, a European official said Friday.

The head of the EU border agency Frontex has said the Greek authorities "did their upmost to save lives" in Wednesday's sinking of a ship crammed with migrants that went down off the coast of Pylos, in the Peloponnese.

Speaking from the nearby city of Kalamata, Frontex Executive Director Hans Leijtens said the sinking was "a horrible incident, any way you look at it."

The European Union is sending manpower to Greece to assist local authorities in the search and rescue mission taking place in the sea area off the coast of southwestern Peloponnese, following a deadly shipwreck on Wednesday that killed at least 79 migrants, a European Commission spokesperson said on Thursday.

The Minister of Internal Affairs of Bulgaria, Kalin Stoyanov, held a series of bilateral meetings in Luxembourg.

He met with the executive director of Europol, Catherine de Boll, and thanked her for the consistent support for our country in its efforts to join Schengen. Minister Stoyanov assured that Bulgaria will work actively to become part of the area by the end of the year.

New data published by European border security agency Frontex on Monday showed that detections of irregular border crossings at the EU's external borders reached a total of nearly 80,700 in the first four months of 2023.