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

Jonathan Lee is a Romani activist from Wales, working at the European Roma Rights Centre.

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 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.

Across 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.