German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has expressed confidence that the country will quickly find ways to deport immigrants convicted of serious crimes or considered Islamic threats to Afghanistan and Syria.
“We are conducting concrete negotiations about this and are confident that we can achieve this for this group,” Faeser said on Thursday during a meeting with the interior ministers of the sixteen German states, just outside Berlin.
There are only a small number of such people, Faeser emphasizes. She said the German government was exploring the extent to which repatriation via neighboring countries would be possible in the case of Afghan nationals, citing Uzbekistan as a country that had previously been discussed.
However, Faeser did not want to publicly mention the names of countries with which talks are ongoing, for fear of endangering “the concrete negotiations we are currently conducting.”
Germany halted deportations to Afghanistan after the Taliban, a radical Islamist group, seized control of the country in August 2021.
But resuming deportations to Afghanistan and war-torn Syria is a hot topic in Germany, especially after the killing of a police officer by a knife-wielding Afghan migrant during an attack in the German city of Mannheim in May.
