Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt plans to send up to 3,000 additional officers to Germany’s borders, Bild reports.
Germany’s new interior minister has issued orders to reject undocumented refugees and migrants and wants to deploy thousands more police officers at the country’s borders, according to the Bild newspaper.
The publication reported the development on Wednesday, the first day of work for the country’s new conservative-led government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has taken a hardline stance on irregular migration.
The report said Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, a member of Merz’s conservative bloc, which has formed a coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), has lifted an order from 2015 that allowed entry to undocumented third-country nationals.
There was no immediate comment from the ministry. Dobrindt is scheduled to give a statement to reporters later on Wednesday.
Dobrindt also plans to send up to 3,000 additional officers to Germany’s borders to curb irregular migration, which would raise the number of border police to up to 14,000, the report said, citing unnamed government sources.
The chairman of the GdP police union, Andreas Rosskopf, told the Rheinische Post newspaper that police have begun to increase the number of officers deployed to the country’s land borders after receiving verbal instruction to do so.
The border force has been instructed to reorganise rosters where necessary “in order to achieve greater availability”, he said.
News outlet Der Spiegel reported that Dobrindt had ordered that extra police be deployed and that they would have to work shifts of up to 12 hours a day to enforce the new regime.
The 2015 instruction was given under then-chancellor Angela Merkel, whose term was defined by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in Germany, many fleeing war in Syria.
Before the German election in February, Merz promised a crackdown on migration after a spate of violent crimes blamed on foreign nationals amid rising support for the far right.
His coalition has since agreed to reject asylum seekers at borders, enable deportations to Syria and suspend family reunions.
Migration has been a contentious issue in Germany, the third largest refugee-hosting country in the world, with 2.5 million refugees, including more than one million refugees from Ukraine. A growing number of German voters say they want the country to accept fewer migrants.
Immigration and asylum were hotly discussed before February’s elections in which the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) doubled its vote share.
In April, the country suspended the admission of refugees through a United Nations programme, as the outgoing centre-left SDU formed a new coalition with Merz’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU).
Since 2016, Germany had participated in a European Union resettlement scheme that accepts refugees selected by the UNHCR. Most come from Turkiye, Egypt, Jordan or Kenya.