A repatriation of migrants is causing tension between Warsaw and Berlin: Poland’s border guard accuses the federal police of bringing a family of asylum seekers from Afghanistan across the border without consultation and dropping them off on the Polish side.
“The transfer of foreigners to Poland (to the village of Osinow Dolny) by the German police was carried out in violation of the principles of cooperation between the two agencies and the transfer law,” the border guard wrote on Monday on X. “The German authorities must not make such a decision arbitrarily.”
The internet news site Chojna24 had previously published footage showing a German police car driving into Polish territory on Friday morning and abandoning five foreigners in a parking lot in Osinow Dolny (Niederwutzen). According to eyewitnesses quoted by the website, the van then immediately drove back to Germany. Passers-by alerted the Polish police and border guards, who took care of the foreigners.
The case occupied Polish media over the weekend, so that Prime Minister Donald Tusk also took up the issue. “I will speak to Chancellor Scholz about the unacceptable incident between the German police and a migrant family on our side of the border,” Tusk announced before the special EU summit in Brussels.
The Polish Interior Ministry, in turn, stated that department head Tomasz Siemoniak wanted to talk about it with his counterpart Nancy Faeser (SPD).
According to the Federal Police, the excitement is unjustified. In a statement to the German Press Agency, they say that as part of the temporarily reintroduced internal border controls, officers stopped an Afghan family of five near Altmädewitz in Brandenburg in the early hours of June 14th, who had attempted to enter the country illegally. The family had Polish asylum certificates for the adults and Polish home ID cards for the children; they did not submit an asylum application to the German officers. According to the law, they should therefore be returned to Poland.
According to the Federal Police, the Polish border guards were informed via the Joint Center in Swiecko that the family was to be handed over. “As there was no response from the Polish side for several hours, even when asked, the officers decided to take the family with a patrol to the German-Polish border near Hohenwutzen in order to release them from there to Poland.”
On the way, the family’s children complained of feeling unwell, which is why the federal police officers headed to a pharmacy in Osinow Dolny to provide first aid. Since the children’s mother had forgotten her cell phone at the federal police station, she was taken back to Brandenburg in a patrol car and then back to her family in Poland.
The incident is being “intensively investigated” with Polish colleagues, the federal police said in a statement. The Polish border guard announced that its top brass would discuss the matter with the federal police leadership on Tuesday.
