Baden-Württemberg Tripled Its Deportations in Three Years. Then Refused Even a Winter Freeze.

Baden-Württemberg likes to sell itself as Germany's green conscience — a state where the Greens have run the executive since 2011 and can point to solar rooftops and bike lanes as proof of a different politics. Its deportation regime tells a different story. State-level data compiled by the Flüchtlingsrat Baden-Württemberg from the Regierungspräsidium Karlsruhe show deportations rising from 2,099 in 2023 to 2,873 in 2024 to 3,397 in 2025 — a 62 percent jump in two years, under a coalition that markets itself as humane on migration while running one of the country's more aggressive removal machines.

The people being removed are disproportionately Roma from the Western Balkans, a group whose persecution across Serbia, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia is documented by NGOs across Europe, and whose countries of origin Germany nonetheless classifies as "safe." Premier Winfried Kretschmann personally backed that classification in the Bundesrat. Roughly 12,000 people from the region live in Baden-Württemberg, many for years, and remain removable at any point because the state refuses to declare even a temporary winter deportation freeze — something Schleswig-Holstein's SPD-Green government has done. Refusing a freeze isn't neutral: it is an active choice to keep families removable through the coldest months, a choice this state's ruling coalition makes every year it declines to act.

Children are absorbing a growing share of this. Minors deported from Baden-Württemberg rose from 180 in 2021 to 312 in 2023 to 581 by the end of September 2025 alone — more than triple in under four years. A Bundesverfassungsgericht ruling from September 2025 affirmed that even a room inside a shared refugee shelter is protected under Article 13's inviolability-of-the-home guarantee, meaning police need judicial authorization to force entry even for a deportation. That the country's constitutional court had to spell this out for state police forces says plenty about what "standard procedure" had quietly become.

None of this happens without resistance. Collective deportation flights out of Baden-Airpark near Karlsruhe have drawn recurring blockades and vigils for over a decade — small, sustained, unglamorous work by people showing up at dawn with banners reading "Kein Mensch ist illegal." It rarely stops a flight. It does mean every removal has witnesses, every number in a government spreadsheet has someone who stood at the fence and said no. First-half 2026 figures show deportations down 22.7 percent year-on-year — worth watching, not yet worth trusting as a reversal, since state governments have a habit of front-loading removals before rule changes and easing off after.

This is what state-level migration policy looks like when it runs on autopilot: no political drama, no headline crackdown, just a slow annual ratchet upward, backed by a premier who votes for "safe country" designations in the Bundesrat and a government that won't spend the political capital on a winter freeze that costs it nothing. The people who show up at Baden-Airpark at 8am aren't going to reverse a state budget line. But they are the only reason this remains a fight instead of an administrative fact nobody has to look at.

Sources

Flüchtlingsrat BW: 3,397 Abschiebungen aus Baden-Württemberg 2025
Flüchtlingsrat BW: 1,423 Abschiebungen im ersten Halbjahr 2026
Flüchtlingsrat BW: Immer mehr Abschiebungen von Kindern aus Baden-Württemberg
Flüchtlingsrat BW: Grundrechtliche Vorgaben bei Abschiebungen aus Zimmern in Geflüchtetenunterkünften
Radio Dreyeckland: Protest am Baden Airpark gegen erneute Sammelabschiebung