Gosia was on holiday in southern France and had made a short trip across the border to Spain. But on her way back, French police were checking all vehicles, “which makes this let’s-go-have-ice-cream-in-Spain trip an entire afternoon of travelling.”

Both France and Spain are part of Europe's Schengen area. There usually aren't any border checks when travelling between two Schengen countries. 3.5 million people make trips across Schengen borders every day, often because the nearest school or supermarket to their home is in another country.

The Schengen zone counts 29 European countries, 25 of them in the EU plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. It has 450 million residents across more than 4.5 million square kilometres.

Getting rid of border controls 21 years ago was intended to knit these areas closer together and encourage more Europeans to travel to or work in another EU country. Many paid attention; up to two million people live in one Schengen country and work in another.

But border checks, reintroduced temporarily during a migration surge in 2015, have become a lasting feature when crossing borders within Schengen.

While governments can carry out spot checks – asking a small selection of people to show their ID – they are not supposed to systematically check every entry unless they have a legal exemption to Schengen rules.

They can get that exemption if they see a serious threat to security. Those checks are supposed to last for six months, and they can be extended for up to two years in exceptional circumstances.

The European Commission said any exemption should be a “measure of last resort”. Its 2026 report on the Schengen area said in most cases “the reintroduction of internal border controls concerned nonsystematic spot checks.”

These come on top of regular permanent border checks at points where Schengen nations control entry from non-member countries, such as Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Türkiye, Serbia, and even the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“A whole generation of Europeans grew up with little memory of systematic internal border checks,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in 2020.

“Thanks to Schengen, companies transport goods around our internal market with just-in-time supply chains. And most importantly, people created cross-border links and European families.”

The European Correspondent out of office

I crossed four Schengen countries by car this summer without seeing any border checks: Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Italy.

Other journalists at The European Correspondent weren't so lucky.

Toyah Höher said she's been checked on the Denmark-Germany border “every time” when crossing by train or bus.

“As far as I can tell, they check everyone,” she said, adding that the Danish military carry out the checks when entering Denmark.

Sebastian Gräff's bus from Poland to Germany got inspected by German police.

“Everyone was checked, and sometimes questions were asked,” he said.

Ewa Braniecka had checks on a train trip from Poland to Germany.

“Deutsche Bahn even adds permanently that the train is delayed at Frankfurt an der Oder by 10 minutes as the German police come on board. My ID was checked only once, and they barely gave it a look once they saw it was an EU ID,” she said.

“They would approach anyone with a non-white skin colour, or speaking Russian or Ukrainian,“ she said. “When crossing the border by car, I was never stopped. But every time, I saw that they had stopped and were checking a Flixbus.”

When border checks may be going too far

Germany currently has an exemption from the European Commission that allows it to check entry on all its land borders. So do 10 other Schengen countries, including France. They all need to give reasons for why they want to reimpose checks on a given border.

The reasons cited by governments include irregular migration and migrant smuggling, Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine, possible sabotage actions by Russia, terrorism-related incidents and organised crime, threats linked to the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, persistent jihadist threats, and the risk of attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets.

Without that justification (and without the lifting of Schengen rules) some border checks may contravene EU law.

However, in practice, it's hard – and even unwise – to challenge a police officer or soldier who could state another reason for asking to see your ID.

Jon Worth, a rail policy researcher and campaigner, said he has complained to the European Commission about border checks he has witnessed that he suspects are systemic and so may not be legal.

This is difficult to prove so he went to Frankfurt an der Oder, a German town on the Polish border, in 2022 to see if border checks were being carried out on everyone crossing the border, even though there was no suspension of Schengen rules, an experience he detailed on his website.

“I sat in different places in the railway station for a whole day. Checked when police boarded a train, when police got off the train, how long it took, and estimated how many passengers were in there. And every single passenger on every single train was controlled,” he told The European Correspondent.

Do these extra border checks even work?

Jon has visited 428 international EU border lines, more than 200 of them within Schengen, as part of his research to analyse cross-border railway links.

“I get subjected to a lot of border controls,“ he told TEC. “You're almost certain that everyone is going to get a check on a train in Kehl” on the French-German border near Strasbourg, he said. Every high-speed train going to Germany there “is held and delayed.”

That adds at least 15 minutes to the journey time, which means passengers risk missing a connection.

“I've actually ended up six hours late in Budapest as a result of a knock-on effect of all of those delays,” he said.

But other checks, even on the same border line, are inconsistent.

“If you are on a small road or a small path, no one gives a damn,” he said. “Even in Kehl, there is a pedestrian footbridge over the Rhine, two kilometres south of where the train bridge is. Nothing at all!”

“If you were a hardened criminal here and you wanted to get people over any of these borders, you can. This is not making any dent whatsoever in any sort of migration,” he said.

“For people living in poorer regions, it's a pain. It's costly for everyone concerned, but we're still doing it.”

When borders came back

The turning point for border checks was 2015, when some 1.8 million people crossed into the EU to claim asylum, many fleeing the civil war in Syria or conflict in Afghanistan. They came to the EU via Greece or the Western Balkans, but many wanted to go to richer states further north to seek asylum.

Five Schengen states reacted by reintroducing border controls for arrivals from the south: Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. France later introduced controls after the Paris terrorist attack in November 2015, and Belgium did the same after Brussels attacks in March 2016.

Those controls, supposed to be temporary, have never entirely disappeared, even as migration flows slumped. When the Covid virus hit in early 2020, 18 Schengen countries reinstated border controls to contain the pandemic.

Some border checks fall away, and others are reimposed. The European Commission has usually agreed to extend the controls even as it warns member states that they should be working on phasing them out.

Today, 11 Schengen countries have border controls within Schengen: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland.

The Ceuta crisis

Social media went wild on 30 July with footage of an estimated 80,000 people breaking across the Moroccan border into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta. Some swam across the sea to the autonomous Spanish city of Melilla, on the North African coast, with dozens losing their lives. Most of those who made it into Spanish territory were later returned to Morocco.

The Spanish government even posted a webpage after the border breach to explain that it has a double filter for checks, at the border with Morocco and again between Ceuta and Melilla, “so that irregular entry into the cities never constitutes an entry into the rest of the Schengen area.”

“None of the people who crossed irregularly into Ceuta on 30 July 2026 has left the city for mainland Spain, nor could they have done so,” it said.

Where do we go from here?

Extra checks on a border weigh heaviest on the people who cross every day to work, shop, or study in a neighbouring EU country. The people who were supposed to benefit most from a borderless Europe now risk a police inspection or a traffic jam that adds time to their trip or even deters them from travelling at all.

Alberto Alemanno, a law professor at HEC Paris, wrote that the whole spectacle showed how the European Commission has bent toward right-wing governments.

“The Commission has been increasingly lax in scrutinising whether member states actually meet the strict legal conditions for imposing” the checks and have “normalised what is supposed to be an exceptional measure,” he wrote.

The people of Europe's border regions are also making their feelings known.

Aachen, once Charlemagne's capital of the Holy Roman Empire and now a small German city on the Belgian and Dutch borders, has begged the German federal government to let border controls expire.

“This is absolutely essential for Aachen, because we live by open borders,” Julia Brinner, a spokesperson for the German Greens, told German broadcaster WDR.

Jon said he's very pessimistic about whether Schengen border controls can be reined in.

“We're miles away from a rational and thoughtful debate about this,” he said. “There's the ethics of freedom of movement, and the practicality of it basically buggering at people's lives where they can't actually get where they want.”