Frontex Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri speaks to the media at its Warsaw headquarters on March 31, 2017 | Janek Skarzynski/AFP via Getty Images EU border force gears up for big expansion Agency chief calls for code of conduct for NGOs rescuing migrants.

The EU won't have its own army anytime soon, but it is getting its first uniformed force.

As part of a beefed-up mandate that came into effect this month, Frontex, the Warsaw-based EU border agency, is expanding to set up a 10,000-strong corps of border and coast guards. Along with fighting cross-border crime and terrorism, the organization plays a key role in handling one of the most contentious issues facing the EU: migration.

"We don't have a military army, but we will have, let's say, civilian troops wearing a European uniform. And for certain functions carrying weapons," Fabrice Leggeri, Frontex's executive director, told POLITICO in an interview at the agency's Brussels office.

The dramatic expansion of Frontex from a staff of about 750 — decided under the EU's previous leadership — is the result of an effort to find common ground on a highly polarizing topic that placed severe strain on the bloc during the crisis of 2015. EU leaders are divided on whether migrants and asylum seekers should be distributed across the bloc or stay in their country of arrival, but they agree that the bloc's borders should be well-protected.

Nevertheless, even some leaders who stress the importance of border security are wary of the Frontex expansion. They argue that deciding who enters a country must be the preserve of national governments. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán last year accused Brussels of wanting to take away his country's control of its frontiers.

"The agency under my leadership has demonstrated that it was able to grow" — Frontex Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri

Leggeri emphasized that protecting the EU's external borders will be a "shared responsibility" with member countries. He noted that there will still be many more national border guards — 115,000 in total — than Frontex guards even after the agency reaches its new staff target, which it is scheduled to hit by 2027.

"We [will] have more than 10 times more national border guards than the members of the [Frontex] standing corps," he said.

Members of that corps (about 3,000 of whom will be Frontex employees, with the rest being seconded national staff) will be able to deploy to an EU member state and exercise executive powers such as carrying out border controls. But they will always need the consent of the host member country, including on the use of force and weapons.

The main task of the agency's officers will be to assist national guards in document checks, identifying and registering migrants, carrying out border surveillance and search and rescue operations, and returning migrants to their home countries or other countries they have passed through.

Some EU officials have expressed fears that Frontex could struggle to handle such a rapid expansion, as was the case with another fast-growing EU migration agency — the Malta-based European Asylum Support Office (EASO). That organization's executive director had to step down after an investigation by the EU anti-fraud office over alleged misconduct in procurement procedures, irregularities in management of human resources and possible breaches of data protection.

But Leggeri said Frontex had already grown significantly since he took over in January 2015, with its budget increasing from €94 million then to almost €340 million this year and staff more than doubling.

Leggeri, a 51-year-old French official who hails from the Alsace region, said his organization will not face the same troubles as EASO. "The agency under my leadership has demonstrated that it was able to grow," he said.

Focus on returns

Frontex will have an important part to play in European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's drive to seal a new pact on migration among EU members. To achieve that aim, the EU will also have to get better at returning rejected asylum-seekers to their home countries or other countries outside the bloc that are willing to take them. At the moment, fewer than half of rejected asylum-seekers are returned — for a mixture of legal and logistical reasons.

Some diplomats say that improving returns could convince countries such as Italy and Greece, which receive many of the migrants who arrive on Europe's shores, to sign up to a pact that would also be acceptable to Central and Eastern Europeans.

Leggeri said the number of returns "can be improved." But he also put the ball in the court of national authorities, saying they had to act before border agents could physically return migrants to other countries.

A couple of years ago, Leggeri was at the center of a storm over remarks he made on the role of NGOs in rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean.

"Only member states can decide to return irregular migrants. So we first need a return decision ... and this can only be decided by national authorities," he said.

If the national authorities do their part, Leggeri said, his agency can help with the logistics.

"We offer seats on scheduled commercial flights," he said. "Member states like it very much because they provide the returnee, we provide the flight tickets with the flexibility that we were able to negotiate with the airline companies — that even at the last minute or close to last minute, we can change the name of the passenger, which is something that normally is not possible."

A couple of years ago, Leggeri was at the center of a storm over remarks he made to Germany's Welt newspaper on the role of NGOs in rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean. He was accused of saying some rescues were encouraging traffickers to put more people on unsafe boats and alleging that NGOs weren't cooperating with law enforcement.

Leggeri puts much of the controversy down to how his remarks were translated into English. But, he said, NGOs "have to think about the situation: Can my action, that I conduct in good faith ... can it be that it is misused by the bad guys, the criminals?"

Leggeri said he supports an EU code of conduct for NGOs, as recently requested by Italy in a discussion paper presented to other governments and seen by POLITICO.

"It would make sense, as far as we can, to have common approaches on common questions," he said.