Belgian MPs approved a law that allows Belgium’s immigration office to ask an investigating judge to authorize entry into residences that may house people without papers. Once a warrant is issued, police will be able to enter without consent, detain people and search for identity documents. The law is set to take effect next spring.

The power will extend to homes where friends or family are hosting migrants. Police entries can occur between 5am and 9pm and could take place in the presence of children. Belgian officials said the measure will target people denied asylum in Belgium who have ignored orders to leave and are seen as threats to public order or national security.

The law forms part of measures introduced by Belgium’s ruling right-leaning coalition to increase expulsions of people denied the right to stay. Intense debate over the measures has swirled across Belgium for months. More than 60 protests were held across the country in the run-up to Parliament’s vote last Friday. Criticism also came from nongovernmental groups, judges and lawyers’ associations.

Carine Thibaut, director of Amnesty International’s French-speaking Belgian section, called the measure a threat to children, people who opened their homes to migrants and the broader rule of law. “It’s a law of fear,” Thibaut said. “It really disseminates fear.”

Thibaut’s organisation was among 20 rights groups that warned the law perpetuates the conflation of lack of legal status with delinquency. “The home is inviolable. This constitutional principle should never depend on the administrative status of those who live there,” the groups said.

Critics also said the law is vague about what constitutes a public threat. They cited cases where those terms had been used for people who had carried out undeclared work, run a red light or shoplifted. That leaves individual judges to determine whether private homes can become sites of immigration enforcement.

According to Amnesty International, the judges would not have full investigative powers and would be restricted in whom they could ask for additional information. The rights group also said the legislation fails to provide a means for people to appeal or challenge decisions. “They always say it’s for criminals,” Thibaut said. “We always answer that they already have all the tools to address this problem, because they can do that through the normal justice system.”

Chiara Catelli, an advocacy officer at the Brussels-based Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, known as Picum, said the measure is an administrative process rather than a response to criminal conduct. “This really has nothing to do with people who have committed crimes,” Catelli said. “It’s really about wanting to return people, deporting people, which is an administrative procedure.”

Rights campaigners drew parallels with the US, where arrests by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement have soared under the Donald Trump administration. Catelli said home raids there fuel fear and violence and tear families apart. “We’ve all seen the devastating consequences of home raids in the US, where they fuel fear and violence and tear families apart. It’s deeply alarming that an EU member state is now moving in the same direction,” she said.

Catelli noted that similar measures were already in place in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany. She also said the EU’s recently approved returns regulation, which aims to increase deportations across the bloc, includes similar provisions. Other member states could soon adopt comparable measures, she said. “We’re really afraid that this is the beginning of something that will become more widespread.”

Thibaut warned that measures such as those in Belgium would gradually chip away at the rights of everyone. “It’s the beginning of reducing the state of law and the respect for human rights,” she said. “This time it is for people without papers; after that, it might be people who are using drugs,” Thibaut added. “That’s the way you slowly, slowly dismantle a society based on human rights, on respect for justice and on separation of powers.”