According to the Federal Interior Ministry, deportations from Germany mainly target criminals. But Left Party Member of Parliament Clara Bünger says that the only crime many deportees have committed is not having legal residence.
“I am frequently contacted by desperate people whose relatives or friends are threatened with deportation or have already been deported,” Left Party Member of Parliament, Clara Bünger, told The Local.
“From these accounts, I know that families are regularly torn apart, and that children are deported directly from schools,” she said, adding that these cases are sometimes reported by media, NGOs or other initiatives.
Deportations from Germany are down overall this year, according to official figures from the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), which were released last week in response to a parliamentary inquiry brought by Bünger.
From January to September this year, 14,324 foreigners were deported from Germany in total. That’s down 18.9 percent compared to the same period in 2025.
The drop in deportations is correlated with an even larger reduction in the number of first-time asylum applications – or new incoming refugees, in other words – which dropped by nearly 46 percent in the same period.
IN NUMBERS: How many people has Germany deported this year?
The Local contacted Bünger to ask why she says ongoing deportations from Germany are still too many, and to ask what she knows about who is being expelled and why.
Statements by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt or the BMI about deportations tend to suggest that people being expelled from Germany are criminals.
In a recent statement to the German Press Agency about the more than 200 men who had been deported to Afghanistan this year, the BMI said that the majority of them had committed crimes.
Bünger challenges this characterisation: “The federal government wants those being deported to appear as dangerous and threatening as possible. Therefore it emphasises that it mainly deports people to Afghanistan who have committed serious crimes.”
Portrait of Clara Bünger, Left Party MP and advocate for an AfD ban. Photo provided by Felix Weiss.
The Left Party representative from Dresden suggests that in many cases people are deported for administrative offences.
She noted that the Interior Ministry “does not provide reasons for deportations,” adding that generally people are deported when they do not have a right of residence.
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“It is reasonable to assume that those affected also include people who have been criminalised due to their migration history, or who have committed minor offences such as fare evasion,” Bünger said.
The Local contacted the Federal Interior Ministry for comment and did not immediately receive a reply. This article will be updated if the ministry responds.
Bünger told The Local that she is against deportations to Afghanistan full stop: “The Taliban use brutal repression against political dissent.
“Millions of people in Afghanistan are starving, and unemployment is high. No one should be deported to such conditions. This applies regardless of what crimes a person may have committed.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thelocal.de
