Spiking Expulsion Numbers: A Scalpel to Criminal Migrants
With the recent expulsion of a hardened Afghan felon from Thuringia, Interior Minister Georg Maier stresses the urgency for amplifying such coercive actions. Expressing his views in a press communique, Maier said, "We gotta up our expulsion game. It's a sign of a robust legal system."
On a chilly Friday morning, an expulsion flight to Afghanistan took off from Leipzig. The flight carried 28 Afghan criminals, all of whom had served time for heinous offenses like grievous bodily harm, armed robbery, and assaulting law enforcement. This marks the first expulsion flight since the Taliban invaded Afghanistan three years ago.
Among the deportees was an Afghan from Thuringia, who had been convicted in 2021 for the aforementioned offenses. He had been imprisoned until March of this year and was known to have committed more crimes after his release. He arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied minor in 2015 and had applied for asylum.
The man had been handed a deportation order back in August 2021 due to brittle passport documentation and the precarious situation in Afghanistan. However, Germany lacks diplomatic ties with the Taliban rulers in Kabul.
Knife Attacks and Migration Debate
In a post on the X platform, Maier had declared the expulsion as "necessary and justified" and thanked the Federal Ministry of the Interior for its administrative arrangements. Back in May, Maier had voiced optimism that expulsions to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan were feasible. "The security scene isn't that dire throughout the nation that someone can't be sent there," he had commented.
The context at that time was a lethal knife attack in Mannheim. Following this, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) also expressed his belief that serious criminals and terrorist threats would be expelled to Afghanistan and Syria. The expulsion flight took place just days after the suspected Islamist-motivated knife attack in Solingen.
The Ministry Predicts a Boost in Expulsion Rates
By the end of June 2022, approximately 240 individuals were expelled from Thuringia. In around 550 cases, an expulsion was unsuccessful due to reasons such as invalid passports, illness, or complications that prevented their return to their homeland. In the entire previous year, there were only about 300 expulsions from Thuringia, and around 860 planned expulsions did not come to fruition.
Interestingly, the number of expulsions since 2020, roughly the duration of the pandemic, has fluctuated between 220 and about 240. This information is derived from data offered by the Left Party faction in the Bundestag to the Federal Ministry of the Interior. For the sake of comparison, around 460 and 650 expulsions from Thuringia happened in 2019 and 2018, respectively.
Notably, the expelled Afghan man was actually an original resident of The Netherlands, as indicated in his asylum application submitted upon arriving in Germany in 2015. Despite his criminal record and multiple convictions, Germany had been unable to deport him back to his native country due to passport issues and the volatile situation in Afghanistan. Remarkably, even as diplomatic ties with the country remained strong, The Netherlands continued to maintain diplomatic ties with Afghanistan.
