Germany is expanding the deportation machine while its own government does not recognize the Taliban regime

On September 25, 2026, the Bundestag passed a new federal police law with 322 votes to 134, and the Federal Council passed it. In the future, the federal police will be able to apply for detention pending deportation themselves, without having to go through the immigration authorities of the federal states. A judge may make further formal decisions, but anyone who lowers the application threshold increases the number of cases that end up in court. This is not a technical administrative reform. It is a shift in discretion from municipalities, where migrant communities are at least somewhat visible and organized, to a central authority with uniforms and border control as its core business.

The timing is no coincidence. Since the black-red coalition took office, 250 Afghan nationals have been repatriated to Kabul, most recently 22 men by charter flight from Leipzig/Halle. Federal Interior Minister Dobrindt announced in July that he would no longer limit himself to convicted criminals. The numbers already confirm this: Of 488 Afghans required to leave the country reported by the federal states between July and September 2026, 267 - 55 percent - had no criminal conviction at all. The “we only deport criminals” model that the government has been using to sell this policy for months was already a calming pill. Now it's officially wrong.

The real scandal is that Germany is cooperating with a regime that it does not recognize. In order to obtain the necessary travel documents, the Foreign Office allowed a Taliban “technical support team” to enter the country to issue papers. Pro Asyl puts it aptly: every further cooperation politically upgrades an internationally outlawed regime and opens the door to Europe for it. The approximately 13,000 Afghans living in Germany who are required to leave the country, around 10,000 of whom have a toleration permit, know exactly what they are facing: a country with an “Islamist terror regime,” as left-wing MP Clara Bünger rightly calls it, indiscriminate violence and humanitarian emergency.

The Federal Police Act is the institutional foundation for exactly this escalation. Anyone who can more easily apply for detention pending deportation needs less consideration for individual case assessment, less time for lawyers, and less publicity. The statistics clearly show the long-term trend: After a decline during the pandemic years, the number of deportations from Germany has been rising continuously since 2021 and reached 20,084 in 2024 - the highest value since 2019. This new legislation is not a break with developments, it is its logical continuation: more access, less control, more people being sent back to countries where they are threatened with persecution or death.

Anti-fascist solidarity here means: concrete support for those affected by deportation detention, strengthening legal advice from refugee councils, and clearly naming political responsibility. It's not "the administration" that deports people. A coalition of the CDU/CSU and the SPD has decided to lay the ax to what little legal protection deported people had left - and they are doing so in alliance with a regime whose human rights violations they condemn in every Sunday speech.

Sources

Federal police are allowed to apply for detention pending deportation (ms-aktuell.de)
Deportations to Afghanistan: Slight majority of Afghans on deportation list are not criminals (time)
Germany deports another 22 men to Afghanistan (Time)
Deportations in Germany - Figures on asylum (bpb.de)