[18] The corps is composed of agency and member states' officers, who support and work under the command of the national authorities of the country in they are deployed in.

The future officers who are recruited do not necessarily need prior law enforcement experience, and undergo a year of training organised by the agency.

A mandatory vulnerability assessments of the capacities of the Member States to face current or upcoming challenges at their external borders will be established.

As of 2024, Frontex has concluded working arrangements with the authorities of 18 partners: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Cape Verde, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States.

[24] The Border and Coast Guard has a supportive capacity to repatriate immigrants residing illegally in the union and is responsible for the coordination of return operations.

The EU's precursors, the European Communities which were founded in the 1950s, had little mandate to facilitate coordination between member states' border and coast guard authorities.

The management board is the leading component of the agency, controlling the personal, financial, and organisational structure, as well as initiating operative tasks in annual work programmes.

[41] The Commission was prompted to take swift action due to the immigration crisis of 2015, which brought to the forefront the need to improve the security of the external borders of the union.

Ever since Frontex was transformed into the Agency in 2016, the broader mandate has been deemed controversial, and the issue of whether the EU or the member state were competent in border management has also been a matter of debate.

However, concerns regarding human rights violations are still being voiced, in particular, due to the broader executive powers of the Agency under the revised regulation.

What the Commission draft Regulation aims to do is to strengthen the mandate of the EU border agency, to increase its competences and to better equip it to carry out its operational activities.

[48] African and other would-be illegal immigrants continue to set sail for Italian shores aboard unseaworthy boats and ships.

Several of these attempts have ended with capsized boats and hundreds of people drowning in the sea, though the Italian navy has saved thousands of lives in its Operation Mare Nostrum.[49][relevant?]

The operation, under Italian control, began on 1 November 2014 and involves voluntary contributions from 15 other European nations (both EU member states and non-members).

Current voluntary contributors to Operation Triton are Croatia, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Malta and the United Kingdom.

As of 2015[update] voluntary contributors are Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Malta and the United Kingdom.

[50] The operation's assets consist of two surveillance aircraft, three ships and seven teams of staff who gather intelligence and conduct screening and process identification.

[53] Fabrice Leggeri, the head of Frontex, dismissed turning Triton into a search and rescue operation, saying it would "support and fuel the business of traffickers".

[54] On 12 December 2015, it was reported that a newly founded asylum seeker reception centre in Moria, Lesbos, Greece was coordinated, controlled and monitored by Frontex.

[55] In an NGO Statement on International Protection presented at the UNHCR Standing Committee in 2008, a broad coalition of non-governmental organisations have expressed their concern, that much of the rescue work by Frontex is in fact incidental to a deterrence campaign so broad and, at times, so undiscriminating, that directly and through third countries – intentionally or not – asylum-seekers are being blocked from claiming protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

[58] Despite a 2012 European Court of Human Rights ruling that refugees should not be returned to Libya, due to the risk of torture and violence, Frontex was criticised in April 2021 for supporting the Libyan Coast Guard to do so.

[59] In September 2009, a Turkish military radar issued a warning to a Latvian helicopter patrolling in the eastern Aegean—part of the EU's Frontex programme to combat illegal immigration—to leave the area.

Frontex later took photographs of the Turkish Coast Guard escorting illegal immigrants towards Greek waters and the photos accompanied by written evidence were submitted to EU authorities.

[60] On 7 December 2020, the EU's anti-fraud watchdog, OLAF, raided the offices of Frontex Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri, as well as his head of Cabinet Thibauld de La Haye Jousselin as part of an investigation into allegations of staff harassment, misconduct and migrant pushbacks.

[64] According to an internal document seen by the Greek Newspaper Ekathimerini, Leggeri "actively resisted" the recruitment of the required 40 fundamental rights officers provided for in the regulation of the new European Border and Coast Guard Agency, answering frequent questions from agency staff in early 2020 that "it is not a priority and "repeatedly made it clear to staff" that "Frontex is not an expensive lifeguard service."

The story also accuses Leggeri of being in charge of a "comically incompetent" human resources department that formally offered jobs to large numbers of Standing Corps personnel and then withdrew them the next day.

[67] In 2020, ships of Frontex were complicit in illegal so-called "pushbacks" of migrants attempting to reach mainland Europe via Greek waters.

[70] Reported problems included first-person accounts of offers for the Standing Corps being made and then withdrawn the following day; recruits being brought to Poland for training only to be told they had failed a medical test the previous month and then abandoned; inadequate provisions made for COVID protection during training; and nonexistent communication with new staff about key practical issues.

[71] In June 2021, former FRONTEX deputy director Gil Arias Fernández criticised the agency's recruitment process, stating that it had no safeguards in place to prevent infiltration by far-right extremists.

[72] In February 2021, Frontex was accused of its staff meeting "with scores of unregistered lobbyists that represent the weapons, surveillance and biometrics industries".