Germany has returned over 11,000 migrants to Poland in past 14 months

Apr 11, 2025 | Politics, Society

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Official data obtained by Polish media show that, in the space of 14 months between January 2024 and February 2025, Germany returned to Poland over 11,000 migrants who had unlawfully crossed the Polish-German border.

The findings come as the issue of migration in general, and returns of illegal migrants from Germany to Poland in particular, has become a hot topic amid the campaign for next month’s Polish presidential elections.

The data have been published by Interia, one of Poland’s leading news websites, which notes that there are three ways in which migrants can be returned from Germany.

One is under the so-called Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that, if an asylum seeker submits a claim for international protection in one EU member state but then moves to another before it is processed, they can be returned to the original member state.

The second, a so-called “readmission procedure”, is based on a bilateral agreement between the two countries that allows the return of other types of migrants who have illegally moved from Poland to Germany. Both the readmission and Dublin procedures require Germany to inform Poland of the returns.

A third possibility, which Interia notes does not require Poland to be informed, relates to the controls that Germany reintroduced on the Polish border in 2023 in response to illegal immigration.

Under normal circumstances, there are no border checks between the two countries because both are part of the European free-travel Schengen Area.

But now, if German checks (which can take place inside the country as well as at the border itself) find that a person has illegally crossed from Poland, the German authorities can send that person back without informing Poland. Such returns are now by far the most numerous.

Interia notes that data it has obtained from the Polish border guard and German authorities show that, from the start of January 2024 to the end of February 2025, there were 1,077 returns under the Dublin and readmission procedures.

Meanwhile, figures obtained from the German federal police show that, during the same 14-month period, a further 10,343 migrants were returned as a result of border controls.

Around half of that latter figure were Ukrainians, who made up 5,199 of the total. Other nationalities with relatively large numbers of returns were Afghans (584) and Georgians (430).

Meanwhile, although Poland’s main opposition party, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), has claimed that returns from Germany are a growing problem, Interia’s data shows the opposite.

In the period from January to May 2024, there was an average of 981 returns (of all three types combined) per month. In the period from June 2024 to February 2025, the figure fell to 724.

In recent weeks, senior PiS figures, including its leader Jarosław Kaczyński, have held protests at border crossings with Germany, criticising the Polish government for allowing the return of migrants.

In actual fact, the number of asylum seekers returned by Germany to Poland under the Dublin Regulation was higher in 2023, when PiS was in office until mid-December, than in 2024, when the current governing coalition was in power.

Last month, as political pressure over the issue grew, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that Poland would stop complying with the Dublin Regulation as well as its bilateral agreement with Germany on readmissions. Since then, however, no further details of such actions have been released.

Tusk’s government has also introduced a new law suspending the right to apply for asylum when entering the country through Poland’s eastern border with Belarus. Many of the migrants who unlawfully enter Germany from Poland have arrived via Belarus.

On 18 May, Poland will hold the first round of presidential elections in which the issue of immigration has became a central theme of the campaign, with all three of the leading candidates talking tough on the issue.


Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

 Main image credit: Combat Camera Poland/Flickr (under CC BY-NC 2.0)

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