Lessons from an Italian Court Decision (Tribunal of Cagliari, R.G. No. 5109/2024, December 23, 2025)
In the American debate on immigration enforcement, one recurring problem is conceptual confusion: every form of protection against removal is often perceived as a step toward permanent settlement. This assumption is not only inaccurate, but legally dangerous. It weakens enforcement, undermines public trust, and blurs the distinction between lawful immigration and temporary humanitarian safeguards.
A recent Italian court decision offers a useful comparative perspective. On December 23, 2025, the Tribunal of Cagliari, Immigration Section, issued a decree in case R.G. No. 5109/2024, recognizing what Italian law defines as complementary protection. While the legal framework is European, the underlying logic is highly relevant for an American audience.
The decision did not grant asylum. It did not recognize refugee status. It did not create a pathway to permanent residence. Instead, the court identified a temporary legal barrier to removal, grounded in constitutional and international obligations that prohibit expulsion when removal would result in serious violations of fundamental rights.
This distinction matters.
Complementary protection, as applied by the Italian court, functions as a negative safeguard, not a positive immigration benefit. Its purpose is not to authorize long-term stay, but to prevent removal when the state is legally barred from executing it. The protection exists only as long as the obstacle to removal exists. Once that obstacle disappears, the legal basis for remaining disappears as well.
In U.S. terms, this logic is closer to withholding of removal or Convention Against Torture protection than to asylum. It is protection without settlement, relief without amnesty, and legality without regularization.
The Cagliari decision explicitly rejected refugee status and subsidiary protection. The court intervened solely because removal, at that specific moment, would have conflicted with binding legal obligations related to health, dignity, and proportionality. The judgment reaffirmed that immigration enforcement remains legitimate, but only within the boundaries imposed by higher norms.
This approach highlights a crucial principle: enforcement credibility depends on legal restraint, not its absence.
Here is where the concept of ReImmigration becomes central. ReImmigration does not mean indiscriminate deportation, nor does it deny humanitarian safeguards. It means recognizing return as a normal and lawful outcome once temporary protections are no longer justified. Protection and return are not opposites; they are sequential functions of a coherent legal system.
The Italian case demonstrates that a state can protect individuals when removal is unlawful while preserving the authority to enforce return when it becomes lawful again. There is no contradiction between due process and enforcement—only between clarity and confusion.
For American policymakers, judges, and legal scholars, the lesson is straightforward. The real threat to immigration enforcement is not judicial oversight, but the transformation of temporary protections into de facto permanent status. When every barrier to removal is treated as an implicit right to remain, the system collapses under its own incoherence.
Complementary protection, properly understood, strengthens the rule of law. It draws a clear line between:
- protection and immigration,
- legality and discretion,
- humanitarian restraint and sovereign authority.
ReImmigration completes that line. It restores return as a lawful, predictable, and non-punitive outcome once protection is no longer required. Not as ideology, but as legal function.
The Italian decree of December 23, 2025, case R.G. No. 5109/2024, reminds us of a fundamental truth: a system that cannot end protection cannot govern immigration. Protection must exist—but so must its endpoint.
That balance is not weakness. It is the essence of the rule of law.
Avv. Fabio Loscerbo
Attorney at Law – Bologna Bar
Registered EU Transparency Register No. 280782895721-36
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