Deportation flights signal Germany's pivot to hardline stance on migration
Five hours previously, the parents and their four children aged five to 17 had been bundled on to a charter flight to Baghdad.
They are now back in the country they fled in 2014 after the Islamic State terror organisation murdered 5,000 members of their Yazidis (Kurdish) minority.
After landing, 12-year-old Maatz Quassim sent a voice note to a
Berlin
radio station about the dramatic end, in the middle of the night, of their happy life in Brandenburg.
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'They shouted 'police' loudly and shone their torches in our faces,' she said. 'Now we're afraid.'
In a statement, the federal interior ministry said the deportation flight with the Qassims and 37 others 'demonstrates that we are continuing to push forward resolutely with a
migration
policy shift'.
Last May, Germany's centre-right
Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) took office promising a tougher approach to migration and asylum, imposing checks on all German borders and promising 'more pressure on returns'.
The shift is a response to two developments. The first: a series of fatal knife and car attacks in recent years where, in many cases, perpetrators were failed asylum application with overdue deportation orders.
Last week's flight, the statement said, deported '14 single men, some of whom have a criminal record'.
'We will continue to carry out deportations,' the ministry concluded, 'provided they are legally and effectively possible.'
There are no criminals in the Qassim family and, while doubtlessly effective, the legality of their deportation is in doubt.
The court ruling granted them leave to challenge the refusal of their asylum application.
The Brandenburg state refugee council denounced the dawn raid as a 'scandalous' example of
Germany
's new 'deportation agenda, driven by the right wing'.
'The fact that they are Kurdish Yazidis from northern Iraq should have prevented the rejection of their asylum application,' it said. 'Germany recognised the Yazidi genocide and said we have a particular responsibility here as a result.'
But German politicians, particularly in the CDU, say they feel a greater responsibility to their own voters. That leads to the second motivator for the migration pivot: an opinion poll which, this week saw the far-right Alternative for Germany (
AfD
) pull level with the CDU.
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Germany increases border checks: Alexander Dobrindt oversees radical policy shift
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]
A decade ago, as Germany faced a growing refugee crisis, chancellor
Angela Merkel
adopted a motivational 'we can do this' approach to the challenges of welcoming and integrating more than a million people annually.
Last Friday, her CDU successor
Friedrich Merz
binned that legacy.
'Some 10 years on we know that, in the [integration] context she meant ... we clearly haven't managed it,' he told journalists in Berlin.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz (right) and his interior minister Alexander Dobrindt. Photograph:As Merz spoke in the capital, his interior minister Alexander Dobrindt presided over a gathering of migration hardliners in his native Bavaria.
To the top of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak, Dobrindt invited counterparts from France, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Denmark, as well as
European Union
home affairs commissioner Magnus Brunner.
The informal gathering proposed greater use of drones at the EU's outer borders, ex-territorial 'return centres' for failed asylum seekers and the use of trade and development aid as leverage in negotiations over returns to third countries.
'We are all concerned that overburdening our countries through illegal migration is contributing massively to the polarisation of society and want to push back against this,' the ministers said in a concluding document.
Despite its pivot, Germany has shied away from backing more radical migration proposals circulating in Europe.
Last May, all of Dobrindt's Zugspitze guests backed a Danish-Italian demand for reform of the European Convention on Human Rights to 'match the challenge that we face today'.
The paper warned that the convention, and the European court that oversees it, no longer reflect the realities of modern migration and, too often, results in 'the protection of the wrong people'.
The
European Court of Human Rights
dismissed the paper, saying 'debate is healthy but politicising the court is not'.
The Zugspitze document attempts a balance, vowing to 'preserve the judicial independence and guarantees of the European Human Rights Convention' while 'respecting the interests of the member states'.
The Zugspitze gathering was an effort by Berlin to ease tensions with its immediate neighbours over its new border checks and refusal to accept asylum seekers from other EU states.
Warsaw and other capitals are holding their tongues in public, anxious not to halt Dobrindt's momentum.
His ministry organised a second deportation flight last week with 81 people aboard, this time to Kabul.
To assist with this and future deportations, Berlin confirmed it had accredited two Afghan consular officials to work from Germany.
It was a bold move given the previous refusal of Berlin, along with other western capitals, to recognise the Taliban-led regime.
Opposition politicians have denounced the move as a 'de facto diplomatic recognition' of the Taliban regime that regained power in Afghanistan in 2021 but remains internationally isolated largely over its human rights record, particularly towards women and girls.
While German migration analysts warn of a populist race to the bottom, Dobrindt's message to voters is clear: 'When ít comes to migration, Germany is no longer the brake but the locomotive.'
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