Refugees: The number of asylum seekers in Bavaria is increasing slightly – Bavaria

The number of asylum seekers in Bavaria has recently increased slightly. People from Afghanistan and Syria in particular were looking for protection, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) announced on Wednesday when asked. 2029 people had applied for asylum for the first time in September, in August it was 1876. In July this number was 2014 and in June 1543.

According to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, a total of 13,943 refugees came to Bavaria in the current year by September, and there were fewer – 13,849 in 2020 as a whole – a further increase is expected, a spokeswoman said, also because of so-called local staff from Afghanistan but currently a “moderate” development.

The slight increase is also evident in the Upper Franconian “anchor center”. Although the mass accommodation in Geldersheim near Schweinfurt does not take on “local staff” – these are usually accommodated in smaller accommodations – the district government is also seeing growth there, especially from Afghanistan and Syria, a spokesman said. An increase has been noticeable since July, and since then the number has leveled off at an elevated level. 910 people currently live in the former US barracks. 44 percent come from Afghanistan, 16 percent from Syria. Another 15 percent are citizens of Somalia, eleven percent of the people come from Algeria. In the past, the occupancy of the “anchor center” was below 900 for a longer period of time, and in the high phases of the corona pandemic it was sometimes around 600. Like the other six Bavarian “anchor centers”, it is currently around 75 percent full.

In the future there will be 150 prison places in Hof

The Bavarian Refugee Council has not noticed any major changes in the number of refugees and “no insane increase in the number of deportations,” reports spokesman Stephan Dünnwald. In any case, the number of 200,000 refugees per year, which Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer described as “justifiable” in 2016, is a long way off in all of Germany. Those who flee Afghanistan from the Taliban, for example, are often still there or in Pakistan or Iran, with the exception of the few who have escaped, but are still far from having arrived in Europe. The number of refugees who were brought to the Polish border by the Belarusian ruler Lukashenko was also not noticed in Bavaria.

Unaffected by the current asylum figures, another deportation prison will be put into operation next Monday. In the Upper Franconian Hof there will be 150 prison places in the future, which the Free State is paying almost 80 million euros. This means that the number of places for deportation detention in Bavaria will initially approximately double. In addition to the 150 there are 96 spaces in Eichstätt, 24 in Erding and 22 at Munich Airport. From everywhere there, the Free State lets people move out of the country – although there is a nationwide stop to Afghanistan, but they are deported to a number of other countries.

The Jesuit Dieter Müller and his colleagues try to at least get refugees out of prison before they may be deported. Müller moved specifically to be closer to Hof prison in the future. “We Jesuits always run after our work,” says Müller, who coordinates the order’s refugee service in Bavaria. Since recently from Nuremberg, because the city lies in the middle between the deportation prison established in 2017 in Eichstätt in Upper Bavaria and the new one in Hof. About half of the inmates come directly from the federal police who picked them up at the borders, says Müller.

The number of unauthorized entries is increasing

Meanwhile, she announced on Wednesday that she recently had to deal with more migrants again – after significantly fewer people tried to enter Bavaria without permission in 2020 due to Corona. From January to August of this year there were 8,850 attempted conversions – 16 percent more than in the same period last year, says a federal police spokesman. Around 4,000 of them were turned away during the controls at the Austrian border, some of the others were transferred to the asylum procedure at Bamf – or in custody for deportation.

If they then go to prison, as will in future also be to Hof, they have to be housed separately from prisoners according to a ruling by the European Court of Justice in 2014. A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice also refers to “more generous visiting times and telephony options”. The Jesuit Dieter Müller is still critical of the Hof prison: The Free State “went completely over the target” with it. Depending on the tenacity and idealism of the lawyer in question, mostly paid from donations, up to half of all cases lead to court judgments, according to which the detention pending deportation was unlawful, he says. This often does not help the inmates because they have already been deported. But regardless of whether this was legal, the instrument of detention pending deportation is used “disproportionately often and for a disproportionately long time,” says Müller. On average, otherwise innocent people often spend four to six weeks behind bars. The Justice Department argues that detention ensures that those obliged to leave the country do not evade deportation.

Jesuit Müller places a certain political hope in a traffic light coalition as it is emerging for the federal government. It could show itself open to demands to provide refugees in detention pending deportation with a state-funded compulsory lawyer and to pay them compensation in the event of unlawful detention. According to Müller’s expectation, this could lead to “the authorities acting differently”.

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