The escape by car ended at a garden fence, but the smuggler continued on foot. At the end of July he was traveling in a vehicle with English registration on the A 94 near Altötting when a patrol from the Freilassing Federal Police Station wanted to check him. The driver left the motorway, but then he rammed the company vehicle with his car, overtook it on the right on the sidewalk, raced past several residents, accelerated to the level of a playground and finally ended up in a dead end in a garden fence. In the end, a service dog caught the fugitive. The emergency services found seven people in his vehicle, one of them in the trunk – during the chase, some of them had torn up their passports and thrown the scraps out of the windows.
It is not uncommon for a smuggler to flee from the police. Just a few days ago, ten refugees, including three children between the ages of three and nine, were slightly injured in an accident. They were sitting in a van when the 28-year-old driver tried to evade a police check and raced along the federal highway towards Eggenfelden at 150 km/h. He lost control of the vehicle in a curve and overturned it.
Smuggling vehicles are often overcrowded, as was the case in Kiefersfelden at the beginning of September, when an 18-year-old tried to smuggle in eleven people in a car with only five seats. The refugees said that a family of four was originally sitting in the car, but got out after an argument about the limited space. Sometimes smugglers simply abandon their passengers on the motorway. The 18-year-old Syrian driver was in Germany illegally and is said to have acted on behalf of a smuggling organization.
According to their own information, the Federal Police registered 13,496 illegal entries in Bavaria alone from January to July, and around 56,000 nationwide during the same period. The almost daily reports about arrests and smuggling trips have long since become routine again, but in the political debate In Bavaria, the topic only played a minor role for a long time. Prime Minister and CSU leader Markus Söder recently preferred to leave it to the AfD and the Free Voters. But a few weeks before the state elections on October 8th, Söder is again talking a lot about refugees and immigration and is calling for an upper limit like his predecessor Horst Seehofer once did.
A woman and a child were brought from Salzburg to Bavaria by smugglers via the A8 motorway.
(Photo: Matthias Balk/dpa)
With Seehofer, then Federal Minister of the Interior, Söder already stood in 2020 in a media-effective manner at the border bridge between Freilassing in Upper Bavaria and neighboring Salzburg. This Wednesday he took a position there with Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) and a lot of police. This time, however, only the white and blue diamond coat of arms is emblazoned on all the blue caps and on the sleeves of the officers; the federal eagle of the federal police, which is actually responsible for border controls, is nowhere to be seen.
But Söder and Herrmann also came to talk shortly before the election in Bavaria about Bavarian successes and especially about the successes of the Bavarian border police, which were reintroduced five years ago. Directly on the 357 kilometer shared border with the Czech Republic or on the 818 kilometer long border with Austria, as was the case in Freilassing on Wednesday, Bavaria’s border police are only allowed to check on behalf of and in consultation with the Federal Police, which has been the case 140 times so far this year. Mostly, however, it is limited to veiled searches in the hinterland. In total, 191 smuggling cases and 3,068 unauthorized entries were discovered last year, reports the deputy head of the border police, Stephan Seiler. This year, according to figures from the Interior Ministry, there were 2,085 unauthorized entries and 154 cases of smuggling by August alone. In addition, the officers repeatedly came across weapons or drugs during their checks and removed almost 1,000 people who were wanted with arrest warrants.
However, some of these increasing apprehensions and search hits could also have something to do with the increasing number of border police personnel and the resulting more frequent checks. According to Herrmann, the border police currently have around 850 officers, more than half of whom have previously worked as veil investigators in other units. According to Herrmann, the missing 150 border police officers up to the target of 1,000 positions announced for this year are still in training. By the end of the next legislative period, i.e. by 2028, there should be 1,500 civil servants, Söder announced in Freilassing. This increase should not only be limited to the border police, but should also strengthen normal inspections in the border area. At the same time, the regions near the border should be relieved of the burden of distributing more immigrants across the country.
Prime Minister Markus Söder (third from right) and Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (right) are informed about the technical data of a police drone by a drone pilot from the Bavarian border police at an appointment about measures for increased border protection.
(Photo: Tobias C. Köhler/dpa)
“Bavaria protects the Free State, but Bavaria also protects Germany,” says Söder, describing the country’s only border police as a clear signal to illegal immigrants “that it is not worth coming to Germany via Bavaria.” According to Söder, there should ideally be 10,000 additional police officers at the borders of the Federal Republic – in federal states that may not be as efficient as Bavaria, these officers would have to come from the federal government. Until the EU’s external borders are effectively protected again, we have to take border protection into our own hands.
For Söder, the Federal Republic is “facing excessive demands from uncontrolled immigration”. He therefore repeats his proposal right at the border to allow a maximum of 200,000 immigrants per year, which the Prime Minister no longer wants to explicitly call an “upper limit”, as Horst Seehofer once did, but rather an “integration brake”. Söder is not deterred by the criticism from the Bavarian opposition that this is a politically unrealistic proposal. Instead, the CSU leader points to Berlin. The federal government must define countries, especially in North Africa, as safe countries of origin and conclude agreements with them and also revise the recently approved citizen’s allowance so that even more immigrants are not attracted. Instead of paying out money to asylum seekers, Bavaria will return to the principle of benefits in kind and rely on charitable work, Söder announces and stands with Herrmann on the Salzach Bridge, where they both let the traffic towards Austria pass them by.