Since the 2015 refugee crisis EU agencies have been at the center stage of EU’s migration and external border control policies and have witnessed a reinforcement of their capabilities. While agencification, as the creation and empowerment of agencies, is not new at EU level, especially in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ), the importance of the post-2015 dynamics has been underestimated by some scholars. Part of the explanation of these diverging views is that agencification in reaction to the 2015 events happened both de jure and de facto. This is especially the case in the hotspots, brought to life by the European Commission through non-legislative texts, that have led to an unprecedented deployment on the ground of the staff from EU agencies to help national authorities screen, identify and register migrants. This deployment is new in terms of its duration, of inter-agency cooperation and of the activities EU agencies have been in charge of, exceeding their legal provisions in some cases. This communication argues that an additional explanatory variable of this different understanding of the post-2015 events lies in the depoliticisation strategies used by the European Commission to push for a quiet agencification and limit the political debates. This paper demonstrates that, against a backdrop of intense politicisation of the refugee crisis at domestic level, the European Commission has attempted, through the hotspot approach, to depoliticise European policies in this area by expanding the capacity for action of EU agencies, both de jure and de facto. However, these critical transformations in the role of agencies have led to a form of “politicization backlash” (Schmeer, 2023, 210), particularly around the issue of fundamental rights violations resulting from agencification. However, the Commission's failure was only partial, and did not really call into question the dynamics at work that persisted during the NPMA negotiations. Indeed, the very intense politicisation of other aspects of EU migration and asylum policies has benefited the agencification pushed quietly by the Commission, both in European law and in practice, with remaining concerns regarding the fundamental rights of migrants.