A military/ charter flight departed from Belgium, supported by Frontex.
We are told that a dozen men and women, who had been locked up for several months in various detention centres in Belgium, were deported by a military charter on Tuesday 17 June 2025 to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
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Charter flights are deportation flights on aircrafts that are specifically chartered for this purpose, with no ordinary passengers on board, that depart from military airports.
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The Frontex agency (European Border and Coast Guard Agency) assists Schengen Member States in organising joint return operations. During these flights, several European countries simultaneously expel people on board of the same aircraft. Frontex provides logistical and financial support for these operations. With a budget that is growing exponentially year by year (997 million in 2025), Frontex is Europe’s most funded agency. Though it is not new, we can expect this method of operating to be deployed more frequently, as agreements are sealed between European states and certain states on the African continent, with the support of the European Union and Frontex as their intermediary.
The day before the flight, the detainees were transferred from the Merksplas and Holsbeek centres to the 127 bis closed centre, located near the Zaventem airport area. They were then placed in solitary confinement before being escorted to the Melsbroek military airport, from where the aircraft took off.
The people deported from Belgium were not the only ones concerned in this collective deportation. It turns out that the military charter was the result of cooperation between Belgium, France, Cyprus and Croatia. That very morning, two small charter planes, one from France and the other from Cyprus via Croatia, transported people of Congolese origin to the Melsbroek military base in Belgium. These flights were operated by Air Charters Europe, a company frequently used to transfer people for collective expulsion, to join the NATO military flight to Kinshasa1.
Upon arrival at Kinshasa airport, deportees are generally subjected to identification procedures by the Direction Générale de Migration (DGM), and followed, in the case of special flights, by further questioning by the Agence Nationale de Renseignements (ANR). According to several sources, people are sometimes detained until a family member or close friend comes to identify them and pays the fees required for their provisional release2.
It is not possible to confirm whether the people detained in Belgian closed centres were able to inform or contact their families and closed ones before their deportation.To our knowledge, the previous collective deportations to the DRC took place on 13/11/20243 and 12/09/20234.
Collective expulsions by military flight, make the few means of resistance available to people threatened with expulsion completely inaccessible (as it is impossible to alert other passengers on the flight, for example). The militarisation of deportations is part of a sickening policy of reinforcing the borders. In the near future, Frontex agents will be deployed in Belgium’s main railway stations to intensify the hunt for people without residence permits.
Arrests, detentions, expulsions: these are extreme methods of applying a xenophobic ideology. Thousands of people are being “removed from the territory”, people that are simply seeking to exercise their right to freedom of movement and settlement.
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