By Valeria Hänsel and Kerem Schamberger
In Germany we have been looking on in disbelief at the US: people are being hunted down and arrested by the US immigration agency ICE because of the colour of their skin. Children are being intercepted as they get off the school bus and parents dragged away if they try and park their car somewhere else – a few days later they are deported to so-called “third countries” – countries like El Salvador, South Sudan, Sierra Leone; countries they have never even seen before. That would never happen here. Right?
What sounds like a distant dystopia is fast approaching Europe and Germany. For months now, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has been working with a coalition of like-minded governments to overturn what is termed the ‘connection requirement’ and enable people to be deported to countries that are foreign to them, that they have no connection to. Last week, Dobrindt made his first breakthrough: not only did the European Parliament designate seven new ‘safe countries of origin’, it also agreed that deportations to third countries would be allowed, provided there is a migration agreement with that country and the person in question transited through it on their journey.
This is ominous: some 180,000 people in Germany are living with a temporary suspension of deportation – many of them cannot be deported to their countries of origin, for instance because their lives and safety would be at risk there. It is primarily these people the Federal Government has in mind as it tries to enable deportations to third countries.
The European Parliament’s decision becomes particularly explosive, however, with the transposition of the reform of the so-called ‘Common European Asylum System’ (CEAS) into national law in June this year. Under accelerated border procedures, asylum applications can then be categorised as “inadmissible” and people deported directly to any country they have travelled through. This is already a reality to some degree under the procedure at airports, which allows people undergoing border procedures to simply be deported back to an airport along the refugee route instead of to their country of origin.
We also already know this practice from the EU-Turkey deal, which marks its tenth anniversary as a prime example of worst practice in March 2026. In Greece, asylum applications are rejected as inadmissible if refugees entered Turkey during their journey. They can be deported without a hearing on their grounds for asylum: to the EU-funded prison system in Turkey, otherwise known as “removal centres”. As the European Commission has documented itself, almost all these people were then deported to their countries of origin. There, all trace of them is lost and it is unclear whether they are still alive or not. It is a policy of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, rendering the same violence currently being perpetrated by ICE on the streets of US cities invisible to European eyes.
But what the example of the EU-Turkey deal also shows is that nothing has been resolved. People are still arriving in Greece, provided the Greek coastguard doesn’t first push them back illegally at sea. The neo-colonial-style practice of shuffling people around the globe at will does not result in less migration, just a systematic stripping of rights. Anyone who believes that this stops at ‘the others’ and does not also undermine the fundamental democratic tenets of society should take another close look at the US.