The complex has 60 rooms, all with a television and a separate wet room. There is a yard with exercise equipment, computers with internet access, and communal kitchens. Next Monday, the first twelve residents are to move into the converted barracks in Glückstadt, Schleswig-Holstein, which State Interior Minister Sabine Sütterlin-Waack (CDU) is promoting with the slogan “Living minus freedom”.
In fact, there is a six-meter-high concrete wall around the site. It is the new detention center in which Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania want to accommodate people who are obliged to leave the country and where the authorities suspect that they want to evade a due deportation.
In the first quarter of this year, 959 people were locked up nationwide in facilities like this one to “prepare for deportation” or, in the vast majority of cases, to “secure deportation”, as stated in the Residence Act. Throughout 2020, the responsible judges sent 3,063 persons obliged to leave the country in detention pending deportation. This emerges from a response from the Federal Ministry of the Interior to a major question from the left-wing member of the Bundestag Ulla Jelpke. She is the one Süddeutsche Zeitung in front.
The numbers are well below those of previous years. In 2019, 5208 people were still in custody. The reason for the decline is the pandemic. Because borders were partially or completely closed and in some places still are, fewer deportations were possible. While German authorities deported more than 22,000 people in 2019, it was only 10,800 in 2020, i.e. almost half.
How often detention is ordered depends heavily on the state
For some years now, a different number has been rising: the authorities are increasingly resorting to coercive detention before deportations. In 2015, detention pending deportation was only ordered for every tenth deportation, and in 2020 for every fourth. According to the figures, deportees usually sit in such detention for a few weeks and only occasionally for longer than three months. In extreme cases, a duration of up to 18 months would be possible.
“Detention pending deportation is inadmissible if the purpose of detention can be achieved by a milder means,” begins the relevant section of the law. But according to the figures, authorities interpret this sentence very differently from state to state. In 2019, Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg and Lower Saxony in particular relied heavily on deportation custody. In contrast, Berlin only had 18 people who were obliged to leave the country detained – and yet deported 995 people. In relation to the population, there are as many as Bavaria, only the vast majority of them are not imprisoned beforehand.
The Linke Jelpke criticizes that it is “unbearable” that more and more “generally completely innocent people” are imprisoned in order to enforce deportations. She demands “that detention pending deportation should in principle be dispensed with”.
Meanwhile, the federal states are expanding their detention capacities, not just in Glückstadt. A deportation detention center is also due to be completed this year in Hof in Upper Franconia. While there were still 522 deportation detention places nationwide in 2018, there were already 611 in 2020. The occupancy figures, however, have declined sharply due to the pandemic, writes the ministry, “in some cases up to vacancy”.