Asylum policy in Germany: Hesse deports parents without their children

When Metin K. and Özlem A. came to Germany three years ago, they imagined their future differently. “We wanted a good life for our children,” says Özlem A. But it didn’t happen as they thought: at the beginning of August, Metin K. and Özlem A. were deported from Frankfurt am Main to Turkey – without their three small children. The Frankfurt Youth Welfare Office had taken the seven-month-old, one-and-a-half-year-old and four-year-old children into care around a month earlier. And here they are to this day.

Custody and access rights had not been clarified at all at the time of deportation. The same applies to the question of what will actually happen to the children. They do not have a residence permit. It is currently unclear whether and how parents will be able to see their children again. Metin K. and Özlem A. are no longer allowed to enter Germany. You are banned from re-entering the country.

Timmo Scherenberg, the managing director of the Hessian Refugee Council, speaks of a “scandalous deportation”. “In my 20 years of consulting experience, I have never seen anything like this.” Family separations are often experienced during deportations, for example when one spouse is not found but the other is still deported. “The fact that parents are now being separated from their three small children and that they remain in the care of the authorities was previously only known from the USA,” says Scherenberg. He would not have thought such interaction possible in Germany.

The family's lawyer, Gönül Halat-Meç, also says that she has never experienced a case like this before. “Parents were deprived of the right to regulate their children’s affairs themselves and to clarify whether and to what extent contact was allowed.”

The Kurdish couple came to Germany in 2023 from a small town in southeastern Turkey, around 25 kilometers from the Syrian border. Kurds make up a significant proportion of asylum seekers from Turkey in Germany. According to estimates by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf), around 65 percent of first-time applicants from Turkey in 2025 were of Kurdish origin. In 2024 their share was even 73 percent.

However, there was recently a peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is banned in Germany. Turkey is also generally considered a safe country of origin in the EU asylum system.

Özlem A. reports on the phone that they were financially well positioned in Turkey. The 25-year-old tells the taz that they came to Germany “not for economic reasons”. Her 27-year-old partner added: “We were afraid for our lives and wanted to live in safety.” Nevertheless, the family's asylum application was rejected by the Bamf. The family sued against the decision. The rejection was finally confirmed at the end of December 2025.

In Germany, says Özlem A., she has reached her limits. There was no suitable environment for the children in the refugee camp. Her older child wanted to learn to crawl there, but there wasn't even a carpet. She was also extremely overwhelmed with food and her health. The family had to share a small room, and at times even a container with another family. She also complains about the lack of hygiene.

Her husband wanted to work, but he was not granted a work permit. She would have liked to go to school herself, “that didn’t work out either.” With small children it was hardly possible to learn the language.

Everyday life in Germany presented the family with additional challenges. Metin K. was briefly arrested because he took the train without a ticket. At first, the family didn't understand how such things worked in Germany. “We had no one to explain to us how to find our way and build our lives,” says Özlem A.

The authorities are said to have noticed the parents' excessive demands on their children. They discovered that the children were being neglected, reports family lawyer Gönül Halat-Meç. About a year before the deportation, an emergency mother was appointed for the family to support the birth mother.

In February 2026, the family court finally withdrew custody of the parents by means of an interim order. According to Özlem A., she then explained to the emergency mother that she would inform the court that the appointment had to be rescheduled as an urgent procedure because she was about to give birth to her third child. Apparently that didn't happen. “Then the third child was born and custody of the third child was also withdrawn,” says lawyer Halat-Meç.

“Despite various offers of support, the responsible authorities were unable to detect an improvement in the overall family situation, so the youth welfare office took the children into care at the end of June and, out of consideration for the child's well-being, there was no longer any contact with the parents,” the Hessian Ministry of the Interior told taz upon request. The youth welfare office “subsequently confirmed a massive state of neglect among the children and a lack of willingness to cooperate on the part of the parents.”

According to their lawyer, the family was never heard in court. She was also not sufficiently informed about the content of the decision. “I wanted to take action against it and request a hearing,” says Halat-Meç. That is the right of the parents. But the lawyer's application for parental custody is still pending. The court dates have been postponed several times. The next date in family court is now scheduled for November.

According to the lawyer, the scandal broke out on July 1st. The parents showed up at the youth welfare office in Frankfurt because they wanted to discuss how things could proceed. There was an argument, said Halat-Meç. On July 7th, the youth welfare office informed the regional council, which initiated the deportation. Metin K. and Özlem A. were then taken into detention pending deportation and were deported to Turkey a few days later.

When asked by the taz, the Frankfurt Youth Welfare Office did not want to answer at the time of going to press whether and why it had asked the regional council to deport him. As justification, the office referred to “data protection requirements”.

When asked, the Hessian Ministry of the Interior stated that the Central Immigration Office and the Youth Welfare Office were in close contact during the planning of the deportation in order to be able to take family concerns into account in the residence procedure despite the parents' enforceable obligation to leave the country and the fact that custody had already been "temporarily withdrawn due to massive problems."

A few days before the parents were taken into custody for deportation, the youth welfare office announced that no main date had been set in the family law proceedings that the immigration authorities could have taken into account at their discretion. At the same time, it was confirmed that the withdrawal of custody was still considered necessary. The Ministry of the Interior has also determined that regular handling of the children is not to be expected in the foreseeable future.

Accordingly, “family reasons and concerns did not stand in the way of repatriation in this case,” the Interior Ministry continued. This did not anticipate any possible pending decision by the youth welfare office.

The Hessian Refugee Council sees it differently. “Taking someone into care can be necessary, but it still has the long-term goal of supporting the parents so that they can take care of the upbringing of the children themselves again,” says managing director Timmo Scherenberg. However, the conclusion that family reasons would not have prevented a return just because the youth welfare office continued to consider its measures necessary is too far-fetched.

Gönül Halat-Meç criticizes that the deportation should only have taken place after a court decision on contact. “It is a very traumatic event for the children to be so separated from their parents,” she says. "Normally the children still have contact. But in this case that is not possible at all." Whether the parents had been deported immediately or two months later would not have made a difference, says the lawyer. "They weren't fugitive parents. They had a permanent place of residence."

After the deportation, the Interior Ministry told Hessischer Rundfunk that the children would remain in contact with their parents by telephone via the Foreign Office. According to the lawyer, this has not yet happened either.

“If the circumstances allow the parents to have regular contact with the children in the future, this is possible,” writes the ministry in response to a request from the taz. However, short-term or temporary family separations are the exception in Hesse and are avoided as far as possible by the responsible authorities. The lawyer is now checking whether the children can come into the care of the Turkish Family Ministry.

"You have to imagine it: There is a family that gives up their old life, goes to a foreign country and tries to start over. And then they send me away and keep my children too," says Timmo Scherenberg. “It’s very traumatizing.”

In Hesse, the “deportation offensive” is now being taken very seriously. In the first six months of this year, 921 people were deported from Hesse. This means that almost as many people were deported in the first half of the year alone as in the whole of 2021. “The only thing we want is our children,” says Metin K. “We can’t see them and we don’t know anything about them.” After the appointment at the Frankfurt family court in November, the family should find out more about what happens next.