In the past few years, the role that development aid plays in negotiations on border politics that MENA countries undertake with the EU and its member states has attracted a great deal of attention in both academic and activist circles. The most widespread assumption is that MENA countries leverage on their status as ‘countries of origin’ and of ‘transit’ for migrant and refugee people to obtain additional development and humanitarian funding from their counterparts in the North, in reward for their engagement in border control cooperation. Building on border practice literature, this paper argues that such an assumption overlooks the variety of ways in which MENA countries maneuver aid to assert their power vis-à-vis the EU and its member states in border politics. Methodologically, the paper builds on extensive qualitative research conducted in Morocco between 2016 and 2019, specifically on the analysis of primary documents compiled by aid actors and interviews with Moroccan and European aid workers, representatives of Moroccan authorities and migrant people that benefit from development projects. I analyse the implementation of three different development projects to highlight three ways in which Moroccan authorities utilize aid as an instrument of border diplomacy: facilitation, if they actively collaborate with European states and international organisations to streamline the implementation of a certain development programme; negotiation, when they challenge the approach adopted by Global North actors in the allocation of aid; obstruction, in the case that they delay or prevent the implementation of a certain migration-related development project. I show how each of these tactics plays a specific role in the regulation of contentious issues in border control cooperation, thus complicating our understanding of Southern agency in aid diplomacy and migration containment more broadly.