German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt plans to maintain border controls despite a decline in the number of asylum seekers.<\/p>\n
“At the moment, our focus is on keeping these border controls in place,” Dobrindt, a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative bloc, told public broadcaster ARD on Sunday evening. He said people were still being turned back at the border.<\/p>\n
In May 2025, Dobrindt intensified border controls that were expanded to all of Germany’s land borders by his predecessor, Nancy Faeser of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD).<\/p>\n
He also instructed the federal police to turn back asylum seekers, with exceptions for people who are ill, pregnant women and others in need of special assistance.<\/p>\n
Dobrindt said that in the medium term, the German government intends to “make the migration system in Europe functional enough that we can move away from border controls again.”<\/p>\n
“But today it would be too early to say when that point will come,” he added.<\/p>\n
In April, significantly fewer people in Germany filed first-time asylum applications than in the same month a year earlier.<\/p>\n
According to information from the Interior Ministry, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) received 6,144 applications for protection last month. That was almost a third fewer than in April 2025, when the agency recorded 9,108 first-time asylum applications.<\/p>\n
The German government also plans to continue deporting criminals to Afghanistan, with Dobrindt saying such deportations were taking place every week. “We are consistently continuing down this path,” he said.<\/p>\n
The minister said the government was in talks with the authorities in Afghanistan on the issue, adding that he could not understand the criticism.<\/p>\n
Anyone criticizing the deportation of serious criminals had to say whether Germany would be a safer country if “these people” were allowed to stay, Dobrindt said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt plans to maintain border controls despite a decline in the number of asylum…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[406,718,7860,393,5,4626,2947],"class_list":{"0":"post-10118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-alexander-dobrindt","9":"tag-asylum-seekers","10":"tag-border-controls","11":"tag-friedrich-merz","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-interior-ministry","14":"tag-press-conference"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}