The fatal encounter off the coast of Chios on February  3 2026  in which at least fifteen people died and dozens more -including pregnant women and children-  were injured when a small vessel carrying people on the move collided with a Greek coast guard patrol boat has been rapidly reframed in official rhetoric as yet another tragic consequence of “smugglers” killing their own passengers. As the European Commission reiterated in Brussels, “every life lost at sea is a tragedy caused by traffickers” and thus enforcement must continue in partnership with third-country actors. (Eunews) Nevertheless, this framing obscures a far more troubling political logic where the construction of anti-smuggling enforcement functions as a liability shield and depoliticizes state violence while strategically criminalising survivors in order to launder responsibility. In the immediate aftermath of the Chios shipwreck, Greek authorities arrested a surviving Moroccan national on suspicion of migrant smuggling, despite that the vast majority of passengers were Afghan nationals and – according to surviving testimony, any evidence to identify any individual as a “smuggler” was absent. (Reuters) This mirrors a pattern of judicial and administrative responses that substitute criminalization for investigation, seeking a plausible culprit rather than an account of institutional responsibility.

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