The nightly deportation of the five members of the Karlsfeld Esiovwa family to Nigeria on July 12th has occupied many people beyond the borders of the district of Dachau. The family – consisting of two seriously ill parents, a son with a disability and two daughters – was previously well integrated, the father had worked for many years in a hotel in Ottobrunn. The fact that 13 officers stormed the family’s accommodation at night – one day before the mother’s tumor treatment – shook groups of helpers, the refugee council, Caritas and politics.
District administrator Stefan Löwl (CSU) presented himself to the head of his immigration office, Alexander Dallmayr, and justified the decision by saying that he had to enforce the applicable law. He asked for “understanding that the immigration office, as the enforcement authority, cannot permanently ignore legislative decisions that have been repeatedly confirmed by the courts.”
As always, when emotions are running high, it’s worth taking a sober look at the numbers: A comparison of the SZ Dachau The number of deportations from the districts around Munich now shows that Löwl’s district is largely alone with the decision to deport children.
Dachau and Starnberg – both districts are headed by CSU district administrators
A comparison of the deportation practice of several districts must take into account that both the number of inhabitants and the number of accommodated refugees vary regionally; the refugees are distributed according to a fixed key. In each case, the deportations that fall under the responsibility of the district offices were inquired about. For the total of 517 other deportations from the administrative district of Upper Bavaria, which the State Office for Asylum and Repatriations organized centrally in 2021, there is no data at district level. According to a response from the federal government, 1,913 people were deported across Bavaria in 2021.
The Starnberg District Administrator Stefan Frey (CSU).
(Photo: Georgine Treybal)
In the Dachau district, 20 people were deported last year – all cases were carried out by the district office. In the district of Starnberg there were only two. Both districts are headed by CSU district administrators, both are law graduates, both districts have a comparable number of inhabitants (Dachau 153,884 and Starnberg 136,092). But why are so many more people being deported in the Dachau district?
The district office of Dachau justified the number, which had already risen sharply at the beginning of this year, with the fact that since the arrival of the numerous refugees in the years from 2015, many asylum procedures have been completed and therefore many asylum seekers are now obliged to leave the country. The Munich specialist lawyer for migration law Felix Briesenick considers this argument to be “nonsense”, the length of the process for his clients sometimes varies considerably; it is by no means the case that more procedures are suddenly coming to an end. According to the Integration media service, the number of nationwide deportations has even halved since 2016 to almost 12,000 in 2021 – since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of deportations has even fallen rapidly across Germany.
“It makes sense to integrate people who have been here for a long time as much as possible”
If you ask in Starnberg why there are comparatively few deportations, District Administrator Stefan Frey (CSU) justifies this with an argument that he has already made several times the guideline of his asylum policy: “Deportations create a lot of administrative work and very often they work out for a wide variety of reasons, for example because the person cannot be found, the plane has already left – or because there is a pandemic.It makes sense for people who have been here for a long time, have a job, speak German and can identify themselves and also, of course, are not punishable, to be integrated here as well as possible.
Apparently this is handled differently in Dachau. Here, father Nicholas Esiovwa, who had a permanent job, was deprived of the opportunity to earn a living – although his employer in Ottobrunn wanted to continue employing him and had vehemently advocated this. After Esiovwa had obtained his passport as requested, the district office withdrew his toleration – the district office no longer considered the family to be eligible for the forthcoming right of residence. A downward spiral was set in motion, which eventually led to the deportation of the family.
“In terms of numbers, the district of Dachau is not particularly liberal”
Stephan Dünnwald from the Bavarian Refugee Council is surprised at the difference between the announced and implemented asylum policy in the district: “The data from the local district offices only give part of the picture, but purely in terms of numbers, the Dachau district is not particularly liberal.” The lawyer Briesenick has had very different experiences with authorities in the course of his work: “If a district office finds that there are urgent personal reasons, then it can issue a toleration,” he explains, “Ultimately the decision depends extremely on the interpretation of the law on site .”
This is also shown by the different numbers of deportations in the Munich area. In Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen no one has been deported this year, compared to two people last year. In the districts of Erding and Ebersberg there were 13 deportees in the previous year, in Freising 14 and in the entire district of Munich, in which around 350,000 people live more than twice as many people as in the district of Dachau, there were 23. In the district of Fürstenfeldbruck there were it will have the most deportations in 2021 with 27 cases overall. In 2022, however, the number fell rapidly to just three cases.
The Brucker district office explains it like this: “The figures given for 2022 are comparatively low, since the clerks responsible for ending the stay have had to take on extensive support activities for the service area since the end of February 2022 as part of the Ukraine crisis.” In addition, 36 “voluntary departures” from Fürstenfeldbruck were documented for 2021.
Only in Dachau were children deported this year
One detail is particularly striking: only in Dachau were children deported this year. In 2021 Freising also deported three children to Nigeria, in all other districts no minors were forced to leave the country. Particularly with regard to the special social hardship of the Esiovwa family, however, there can be no talk of a compulsion to carry out the deportation, says lawyer Briesenick. “In my opinion, a district office has room for maneuver when it comes to deporting small children or not.” The traumatization of the children is an “urgent reason” for a toleration. “In my view, it is simply not acceptable,” says Briesenick.
The case of the Karlsfeld Esiovwa family had particularly shocked asylum seekers because their ten-year-old son Gabriel attended a special needs day care center in Karlsfeld with his disability and, according to the caregivers, had made great progress thanks to the support measures. The youngest daughter of the Esiovwas was born in Dachau, and at the age of six she was sent to a country that was completely foreign to her. The fact that an authority deports children with sick parents is hardly a sad exception for the Bavarian Refugee Council: “Children are deported with frightening regularity,” says spokesman Stephan Dünnwald.