Ramped-Up Punishment: The Advance of Kicking Out Criminal Migrants
Let's get real, y'all. With Georgia Maier, Interior Minister of Thuringia, making moves to beef up deportations, it's time to take action against those felon migrants causing chaos. Speaking candidly in a press release, Maier pointed out, "It's high time we stepped up our game. It shows a strong legal system."
Starting our Monday off chilly but impactful, a deportation flight from Leipzig headed to Afghanistan, packed with 28 troublemaking Afghans, all dancing with a criminal past—guilty of heinous acts like aggravated assault, armed robbery, and cop-attacking. This marks the first deportation flight since the Taliban invaded Afghanistan three years back.
One of the deportees hailed from Thuringia, a dude who got nabbed in 2021 for his shady deeds. After serving his time until March, this guy didn't stop committing crimes. He arrived in Germany as a solo teen refugee in 2015, applying for asylum.
Unfortunately, ol' boy had a deniable passport and the mess in Afghanistan wasn't helping maters. Germany hadn't maintained any diplomatic ties with the Taliban rulers in Kabul.
A Knife-Wielding Situation
In a X platform post, Maier announced the deportation as "necessary and warranted," and gave shoutouts to the Federal Ministry of the Interior for streamlining administrative stuff. Remember, back in May, Maier was all optimistic that expelling bad apples to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan could be a piece of cake.
The context at that time? A deadly knife attack in Mannheim. Olaf Scholz, Federal Chancellor (SPD), grumbled too, saying serious crooks and terror threats would be expelled to Afghanistan and Syria. The deportation flight took place just days after the suspected Islamist-fueled knife attack in Solingen.
Maier's Ministry Expects a Boost in Deportees
Statistics show that by the end of June 2022, around 240 individuals were booted from Thuringia. Close to 550 cases, however, flopped due to issues like invalid passports, illness, or complications preventing returns to homeland. In the entire previous year, there were only around 300 expulsions from Thuringia, and about 860 planned expulsions didn't work out.
Believe it or not, the number of expulsions since 2020—roughly the length of the pandemic—has swayed between 220 and about 240. Information supplied by the Left Party faction in the Bundestag to the Federal Ministry of the Interior puts those stats on the books. Compare this to around 460 and 650 expulsions from Thuringia in 2019 and 2018, respectively.
What's interesting is that the deported Afghan was originally a Dutch resident, as mentioned in his asylum application from 2015. Despite his lengthy criminal record and convictions, Germany couldn't send him packing back to his motherland due to passport worries and the volatile Afghan situation. Funny part? The Netherlands has kept diplomatic ties with Afghanistan in place, while we struggled.
