Greece's top migration official says President Trump's 2024 election victory triggered a continent-wide shift toward stricter border enforcement, and he has the numbers to back it up.
In an exclusive sit-down at the headquarters of the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum in Athens, Migration Minister Thanos Plevris told Breitbart News that the change in American leadership reshaped how governments across Europe handle illegal immigration. Plevris, who described himself as "a fan of President Trump," laid out Greece's own enforcement framework in granular detail, complete with a tour of the country's real-time migrant-monitoring operations center.
The interview paints a picture of a European government that has moved aggressively to the right on migration, built a border wall, enacted detention-first legislation, and now points to dramatic drops in illegal arrivals as proof the approach works. And Plevris made no secret of where the political wind came from.
The minister's central argument was blunt. He told Breitbart News that the single most consequential thing Trump did upon returning to office was overhaul American migration policy, because the ripple effects forced European governments to abandon years of permissive approaches.
"For me, the best thing that President Trump did is the change of the migration policy in the USA and also of Europe."
Plevris went further, naming specific countries, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, that he said shifted their own policies in response to domestic polling driven by the same populist energy that carried Trump back to the White House. Sweden, he noted, had long maintained a left-leaning immigration posture before pivoting to stricter enforcement. Germany's longstanding "Willkommen" stance, which had welcomed large numbers of migrants, gave way to tighter controls.
The political math in Greece itself tells a similar story. Plevris cited polling showing that 35 percent of Greeks support the government's current migration policy, another 35 percent want it to be even stricter, and only 30 percent oppose it on human-rights grounds. His conclusion was direct:
"That means that the message from our citizens is clear: Enough is enough."
That kind of supermajority support for enforcement-first immigration policy mirrors trends in the United States, where even Democratic voters have shown surging support for deporting criminal illegal immigrants.
The interview took place inside the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, a former tobacco warehouse that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis converted into the nerve center of Greece's border-enforcement apparatus. At its core sits the "Centaur" operations center, a room lined with television screens that provide real-time feeds from all 33 of Greece's migrant facilities around the clock.
Plevris walked through the system Greece enacted under new legislation that took effect in September 2025. The law creates a two-track process. Roughly 30 percent of arriving migrants who demonstrate a legitimate refugee profile, meaning they face genuine persecution in their home countries, are transferred to open camps, given the chance to apply for asylum, and allowed to work in Greece if approved.
The other 70 percent, those arriving from countries Greece classifies as safe, Plevris named Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Egypt, go straight to detention. They may still file an asylum application, but they remain locked up while it is processed. If the application is rejected, they face a prison sentence of two to five years before deportation.
There is, however, an off-ramp. Plevris explained the incentive structure plainly:
"It's something very simple. When you come illegally into a country, if I put you on detention, that means you give a signal to your relatives in your country that 'I'm on detention' and 'They want to send me back.'"
Migrants who agree to return voluntarily to their home countries avoid the prison sentence entirely. Plevris said the combination of detention and the threat of years behind bars has produced a measurable deterrent effect, not just on those already in Greece, but on potential migrants weighing whether to make the journey in the first place.
Plevris offered specific statistics to illustrate the law's impact. In the first half of 2025, before the September legislation took full effect, Greece recorded 3,200 illegal arrivals from Egypt through Libya. During that same period, only 69 migrants returned to their countries of origin.
By the first half of 2026, those numbers had reversed course sharply. Arrivals on the same route dropped to 802, a 75-percent decline. Voluntary returns jumped to 330, nearly five times the previous figure. Across all migration routes, Plevris said Greece achieved a 70-percent reduction in overall flows and a 40-percent increase in voluntary returns in the first half of the current year.
The minister acknowledged the system is not yet where he wants it. He said his goal is to match the number of returns to the number of arrivals. But the trajectory, he argued, validates the enforcement-first model.
The Trump administration has pursued a parallel strategy domestically. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the president's immigration crackdown is putting Americans back to work as real wages climb, a direct link between enforcement and economic outcomes that Greece's own data appears to echo on a smaller scale.
Along the Greek-Turkish land border, which also serves as the boundary between Europe and the Middle East, Greece has erected a border wall. Plevris described it as essential to controlling land-based migration flows.
"Without the wall we will have thousands of migrants. I believe you have a wall also."
He added that the combination of a physical barrier, military personnel, and police officers can produce "zero flows" at a land border, a claim that carries obvious resonance with the ongoing construction along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Greece also maintains what Plevris called "good cooperation with the Turkish Coast Guard" to intercept sea-based migration. The Aegean islands near Turkey have long been a primary entry point for migrants heading into Europe, and coordinated patrols have helped reduce those arrivals.
Trump himself has taken notice of Greece's approach. He has posted multiple Breitbart News stories about the country on Truth Social and, during press availabilities, called Mitsotakis a "terrific guy" and Greece a "terrific" ally. The two countries have also signed a memorandum of understanding linking their asylum systems to share what Plevris described as "best practices."
Plevris drew a sharp contrast between Greece's approach and Spain's. He pointed to Spanish legislation enacted in recent months that allows illegal immigrants who find employment and remain in Spain for three months to obtain legal documentation. The result, he said, has been 1.2 million applications from migrants seeking papers, a development he called a "pull factor" that acts as a magnet for further illegal immigration.
Greece refuses to offer a similar path. Under its framework, no migrant receives legal documents through an easy or automatic process. The difference in philosophy is stark: Spain rewards those who arrive illegally and find work; Greece detains them and threatens prison.
Plevris was explicit about why the distinction matters. If migrants can choose their destination, and one country offers a fast track to legal status while another offers a detention cell, the incentive structure determines the flow. Greece has chosen to make itself an unattractive destination for economic migrants who lack a genuine asylum claim.
Trump has pursued a similar logic at home, signing executive orders targeting birth tourism and narrowing birthright citizenship to remove incentives for illegal entry.
The urgency behind Greece's current posture has roots in recent history. Plevris reminded his interviewer that in 2015, under the leftist government of former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party, Greece absorbed one million migrant arrivals in a single year, in a country of just 10 million people.
Proportionally, that would be equivalent to the United States absorbing 35 to 40 million migrants in one year. For context, Trump adviser Stephen Miller has estimated that approximately 20 million total migrants entered the U.S. across the entire Biden administration, a figure that, while staggering, still falls short of what Greece experienced in relative terms during a single year.
Plevris blamed NGOs and left-wing European politicians for the crisis, saying they pushed for open borders and argued that migrants had a right to move freely between countries. He also pointed a finger at the Biden administration specifically, saying the previous U.S. government funded NGOs operating inside Greece, organizations whose advocacy, in his view, undermined enforcement efforts.
When Mitsotakis took power in 2019, Plevris said, the government made stricter migration policy a priority from "the first day." But he acknowledged that implementing that vision was far harder when the United States itself maintained permissive border policies. The shift in Washington, he argued, removed the biggest obstacle.
That shift has been backed by substantial resources. Trump recently signed a nearly $70 billion immigration enforcement bill locking in ICE and Border Patrol funding through the end of his term, the kind of legislative commitment that sends a signal well beyond American borders.
Plevris framed the relationship between Greece and the United States as part of a broader Western alignment on migration. He expressed confidence that if Vice President JD Vance visited not just Greece but Europe more broadly, he would see firsthand how the continent has moved toward the enforcement model Washington now champions.
"I believe that the relationship between the EU and the USA, we are the Western world."
The alliance extends beyond migration. Plevris noted that Greece provided the United States with access to military bases during Trump's military operation against Iran, support he said other allies, including France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, did not provide. That willingness to stand with Washington on security matters has strengthened the bilateral relationship and given Greece additional credibility when it adopts policy positions aligned with the Trump administration.
Greece's broader political trajectory also tracks with the Trump administration's wins on other fronts, from trade to immigration enforcement, a pattern of policy outcomes that is reshaping how allied governments calculate their own positions.
For years, Western elites insisted that open borders and generous asylum policies were moral imperatives beyond political debate. Greece tried that experiment in 2015 and nearly drowned. Now its government is proving, with hard numbers, that enforcement works, and crediting an American president for giving the rest of the world permission to say so out loud.