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.
READ MORE
'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.
[
Germany increases border checks: Alexander Dobrindt oversees radical policy shift
Opens in new window
]
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.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Keir Starmer promises ‘no more gimmicks' as migrant-returns deal with France kicks in
Britain has promised to begin detaining 'within days' asylum seekers who arrive there illegally on small boats, under a returns deal with France that was ratified this week. The 'one in, one out' deal was agreed last month, but only finalised in recent days. It stipulates that Britain can send a small number of small boat arrivals back to France. However, it must also accept an equal number of migrants sent by the French in the other direction, such as family members of migrants already living in the UK. Yvette Cooper, Britain's home secretary, suggested the first detainees could be sent back to France 'within weeks'. Britain's Labour government has insisted the returns deal with France will act as a deterrent to illegal immigrants. Ms Cooper declined, however, to give an exact timeline on when the first returns would take place, while Britain's home office also would not confirm how many migrants would be sent back to France under the scheme, which will operate on a pilot basis for the next 12 months. It is believed only about 50 a week will be sent back initially. READ MORE The arrival on small boats of illegal immigrants to English shores – many of whom then go on to claim asylum – has been a significant political issue in Britain since 2018. The previous Tory government devised a scheme to send such immigrants on to Rwanda, but this was scrapped by Labour immediately upon winning the election last July. Since then, however, small boat arrivals have soared, putting significant political pressure on prime minister Keir Starmer 's government. Official statistics show about 25,000 have arrived on small boats so far this year, up almost 50 per cent on 2024. Figures released by the home office in recent days show 1,047 arrived on 15 boats on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week alone. Balmy weather in Britain since May has contributed to the rise, due to calmer sea conditions that facilitate more crossings. Britain's government this week announced a further £100 million (€115 million) would be spent on border security, including funding for up to 300 extra National Crime Agency officers to tackle the issue. 'The days of gimmicks and broken promises are over – we will restore order to our borders with the seriousness and competence the British people deserve,' said Mr Starmer. The wider topic of illegal immigration and asylum seekers continues to raise tensions in Britain, a year after an outbreak of race-fuelled riots across England. There were several demonstrations over the weekend in London, Manchester and Newcastle outside hotels that provide accommodation to asylum seekers. Meanwhile, hard-right activists who have demonstrated against immigration continue to draw significant media attention in Britain. Prominent activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson , was released on bail on Tuesday after he was arrested on Monday at Luton airport. He had been sought by UK police last week following the alleged assault of another man at St Pancras train station in London. Mr Yaxley-Lennon released a video on Tuesday in which he alleged he had been the one assailed by a man, who was filmed by a passerby lying on the ground at St Pancras, allegedly following an altercation with Mr Yaxley-Lennon. The activist complained to his social media followers that he can no longer walk the streets of Britain alone. He insisted, however, that he had not fled from Britain after the St Pancras incident, as media had reported, but that his trip abroad had been pre-planned.
Irish Times
a day ago
- Irish Times
Tusla expects to be €68m over budget this year as demand for services rises
Tusla has warned it will breach its budget by nearly €68 million this year as it struggles to deal with huge demand for its services. The child and family agency warned in an update in May that it had already overspent by €8.9 million but this figure was likely to rise by the end of the year. Tusla said its expected overspend for 2025 was €67.8 million, which included €7.6 million for children in the international protection process and refugees from Ukraine. In a monthly briefing, the agency said demand for its services was growing, especially for residential care, fostering, legal bills, and caring for separated children seeking asylum . It said it is trying to cut costs by expanding residential provision to replace special emergency arrangements that were a 'significant cost driver.' Tusla said some savings had been made in this area in 2024 through a 'strict pricing arrangement' and that this would continue this year. However, the agency warned that costs remained 'unpredictable' due to the inflated cost of placements. [ Girl (16) 'exchanging sex for money' among three children for whom no secure beds available Opens in new window ] 'As the majority of Tusla's expenditure is on demand-led arrangements, it is not possible to reduce expenditure materially to meet the budget allocated without adversely impacting on services for vulnerable children and families,' the report said. It said there was likely to be an overspend of €38.8 million on placements for special care, fostering, and private residential arrangements. Tusla also detailed the high cost of 'out-of-state placements' which involves a small number of children brought to the United Kingdom when services are not available in Ireland. The briefing said: 'If the agency cannot place children into special care in the existing facilities in 2025, this has the potential to impact on this year's overspend.' It said costs for staff travel were also likely to be up by as much as €2.2 million despite curbs on expenses being introduced. [ Person pretending to be Tusla worker turned up at children's residential unit on night shift Opens in new window ] Tusla also detailed a sharp rise in the number of placements for separated children who had applied for international protection in Ireland. The overspend was predicted to be about €6.1 million on providing 343 residential placements for vulnerable asylum seekers without parents. Other areas of concern for Tusla were Guardian ad Litem (GAL) arrangements under which a person was appointed to represent the interests of a child in court. 'There is continued increased usage of GALs by the court and this also has an increased legal cost,' the document said. The child and family agency also predicted an overspend for child refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine, according to records released under Freedom of Information. Asked about the budget difficulties, a Tusla spokesman said: 'Throughout 2025, the agency has experienced unprecedented demand for services, which was unpredictable in nature, and we have worked to prioritise cost-saving initiatives around these contributing factors. 'Tusla has strong budget controls in place, however the projected overspend for 2025 is the result of demand-led pressures in the agency for the accommodation of children in the care of the State as well as costs for accommodating unaccompanied minors and associated legal and Guardian ad Litem costs.'
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Irish Times
How former GAA manager Séamus ‘Banty' McEnaney made over €200m from housing refugees and the homeless
Almost seven years ago the Government started moving newly arrived asylum seekers into hotels and B&Bs on a temporary basis because the State's direct provision system was full. By early 2019 almost 6,600 international protection applicants were living in the Republic. A few hundred of these were living in emergency accommodation. Today almost 33,000 applicants are living in State-provided accommodation with 25,000 in emergency accommodation. An average of 1,000 people are arriving in Ireland each month seeking protection each month, according to the Department of Justice. A letter from the secretary general of the Department of Integration to the Public Accounts Committee reveals that the Government first approached a company called Brimwood Ltd in September 2018 for help in securing additional accommodation for asylum seekers. READ MORE The department contacted Brimwood on a recommendation from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, which had previously used property provided by the company, according to the letter sent in 2023. [ Séamus McEnaney family group was paid €24m in three months for homeless and refugee housing ] It details how Brimwood Ltd subsequently entered into contracts with the Reception and Integration Agency, now the International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS), 'either directly in its own hotels or indirectly by sourcing accommodation in other hotels and guest houses that they lease from the owners through their own contractual arrangements.' Brimwood was the only intermediary used by IPAS between 2018 and 2021 to source this housing. Seven years later, Brimwood Unlimited continues supplying accommodation for asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees across the country, earning €24 million in State contracts last year. The company received €5.6 million in IPAS payments during the first three months of the year. The directors of Brimwood are Séamus McEnaney (57) and his daughters Sarah (26) and Laura (32). It is an unlimited company so it does not have to publish financial accounts where it might show the profits it makes. Companies owned by the former Monaghan GAA manager and his wider family were also paid more than €14 million for housing asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees in the first three months of this year. There were paid additional sums of more than €10 million for providing accommodation to homeless people to Dublin City Council in the same period. Overall the family companies are estimated to have been paid more than €200 million for the provision of emergency accommodation since late 2018. Séamus 'Banty' McEnaney, born and raised in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, was the youngest of five brothers in a family of nine children. He earned the nickname 'Banty' from his father who declared his youngest son was a 'banty hen' because of the barrel chest he had as a child due to poor health. McEnaney left school at 11 and started working in a local bar. Within a few years, he was holding down a day job in the local chicken house and worked nights at Oasis outside the town, described in the 1980s as Ireland's biggest nightclub. A few years after opening Banty's Bar in 1987, McEnaney and his brothers purchased the Fiddler's Elbow, a popular local restaurant and nightclub in Carrickmacross. The group of brothers continued to build their property portfolio through the 1990s and early 2000s. McEnaney and his brothers also played for the local Corduff GAA football team; his brother Pat went on to become a high-profile GAA referee. One former schoolmate of the brothers recalls how closely knit the family were – 'the joke was if you kicked one of the McEnaneys, all five would come limping after you'. Séamus, who was always the frontman in business dealings, has 'great charisma and energy' but also an 'unshakeable self-confidence', says the former schoolmate. In 2005, shortly after purchasing the Westenra Arms Hotel in Monaghan town, McEnaney took over as manager of Monaghan GAA football team, a position he held until 2010. After a two-year stint managing Meath, McEnaney managed Wexford in 2016 but stepped down the following year. He returned to Monaghan, managing the senior team from 2019 to 2022. 'He lit a fire under that team after 15 years of being in the doldrums,' says the schoolmate. 'He was a great motivator but not a great strategist. There's still a question whether he was a successful manager – he was and he wasn't.' Then Monaghan manager Séamus McEnaney talks to the squad after a game in 2001. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho The McEnaney family was badly hit by the recession. In 2011 a High Court judgment of almost €13.5 million was secured by AIB against McEnaney. The debt, McEnaney said at the time, related to development land. Shortly before the Covid pandemic, news of the McEnaney family's rapidly growing earnings through IPAS contracts began to spread. Football fans at one preseason Monaghan game shouted abuse from the stands at McEnaney, according to one prominent figure in Ulster GAA, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'It's massively changed how people see him,' says the GAA figure. 'Making money off the back of this would really irk people. There's obviously people who have a gripe about him doing well with this. The family always drive big cars and are in corporate boxes; they're not afraid to splash it – and that creates begrudgery.' The State's almost exclusive reliance on private companies, such as those owned by the McEnaney family, to house international protection applicants, is unusual in a European context. A 2022 report from the European Asylum Support Office found most EU countries use State-owned centralised systems or mixed models – State authorities and civil society or private operators – to house asylum seekers. In the UK, state contracts are a source of great wealth for private operators. In May, Graham King, founder of the migrant-housing company Clearsprings Ready Homes, acquired the unofficial title of Britain's 'asylum billionaire' after he joined the Sunday Times Rich List of new billionaires. Nick Henderson, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council Relying on private companies to secure housing for asylum seekers is 'significantly eroding public confidence' in our asylum system, says Irish Refugee Council chief executive Nick Henderson. 'We don't need our own asylum billionaire,' he says. 'These people are providing a service and they're making money from it but it's not necessarily their fault. The fault ultimately lies with the State.' The lack of independent inspections of these centres is also concerning, says Henderson. Since January 2024, the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) has carried out periodic inspections of permanent IPAS centres, which represent just 11 per cent of the 324 centres across the State. Standards in emergency accommodation vary widely, from tented accommodation, to private rooms in hotels and dormitory-style accommodation in repurposed office buildings. A spokesman for the Department of Justice said it was involved in 'regular unannounced inspections of the accommodation centres to encourage compliance'. 'People residing in emergency accommodation tend to experience poorer standards' and live in 'more random or unsuitable locations', says Henderson. Spending millions of euro on this housing is 'ultimately a dead spend,' he adds. 'Let's accommodate people in a way that benefits residents but also gives integrity to the system,' he says. 'That requires very significant political will, to wean the Government off its reliance on emergency accommodation.' Mike Allen, director of advocacy with homeless charity Focus Ireland, says this same reliance on private contractors to secure homeless housing has become a policy of 'repeated short-termism'. Constantly operating in crisis mode, without a long-term strategy, leaves the State in a 'weak bargaining position' where local authorities are 'almost begging private providers to find accommodation', says Allen. 'In some way, homeless people become implicated in this waste of public money,' he adds. Like Henderson, he says his criticisms are not directed at providers such as McEnaney but lie with government for creating a system almost entirely reliant on the private sector. Successive government housing policies have created a situation where many refugees with permission to live and work in the State are unable to find a place to live and must turn to local authorities for support, says Allen. As a result, some of these could end up in State-provided accommodation 'owned by the same landlord but operated by a different arm of the State'. His comments echo those of Dublin Region Housing Executive director Mary Hayes who told an Oireachtas Committee on housing last month that the homeless system had become the 'institutional discharge from one institution to another'. The main factor driving adult-only homelessness is people leaving direct provision, according to the latest DRHE figures. Andrew Geddes, director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute, says some European international protection systems, including the Irish model, have developed a 'permanent temporariness' in their approach to asylum. 'What you're effectively doing is warehousing people in the absence of a longer-term plan,' he says. Susan Fratzke, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, says an ability by government to 'flex up and flex down' in response to unpredictable changes in migration patterns, driven by war and climate change, is a key element of long-term asylum planning. She argues that while State-owned properties are a key element of a functioning asylum housing system, reliance on private contractors is also important. She says European governments need to plan for fluctuation so when numbers decrease, they can prepare for the next surge. 'This causes political tension because governments don't like to say we're planning for a rise in asylum claims, they prefer to talk about what they're doing to reduce numbers,' she says. 'But they could save money by being more realistic about these numbers. That requires political will.' A Department of Justice spokesman said the Government was working towards 'developing a more stable and sustainable accommodation system in the long term' and was moving away from reliance on the private sector through the purchase of 'more accommodation on State-owned lands'. This includes the recent purchase of Citywest Hotel and campus. The Department of Housing has made a similar commitment for homeless people – a spokesman said efforts are ongoing to reduce reliance on private emergency accommodation and secure supported housing operated by NGOs.
