The lower house of the German parliament, the Bundestag, voted today (Friday) to approve a new law that will significantly facilitate the deportation of illegal immigrants from the country.
The law was passed with the support of Chancellor Olaf Schulz's coalition, in an attempt to better deal with the immigration crisis in the European country.
The law was taken off the agenda before Christmas, after the Green Party demanded that changes be made to the wording of the law, and returned today in a revised form that was approved by all factions of the ruling coalition.
However, some Green Party representatives still voted against the legislation.
The Christian Democratic Party opposed the law, arguing that it is not effective enough.
Among the overall changes in the law, called the "Rapid Repatriation Law", is the extension of the possible detention period before deportation from ten days to twenty-eight days, a period that will allow the authorities to complete the investigation and guarantee deportation in the event that the immigrant's asylum request is rejected.
In addition, authorities at the federal state level will have broader powers to search illegal immigrants and people whose asylum applications have been rejected.
In the past, police officers were forbidden to search common spaces and cooperative apartment buildings.
This is an issue that in the past made it difficult to catch illegal immigrants as the police could not locate the people or their identification documents because they were kept in places the police had no access to.
Germany's Minister of the Interior Nancy Pazar interrupted a debate in the Bundestag, photo: AFP
The Minister of the Interior, Nancy Pazar, defended the law in what she said during the debate in the Bundestag.
"Those who have no right to stay will have to leave the country faster now. Foreign criminals and those who are found to be a threat will have to be deported," Pazar said.
The Minister of the Interior chose to point out that the number of deportation cases of illegal immigrants increased in 2023 by 27 percent compared to the previous year and that 16,430 illegal immigrants were deported from the territory of Germany.
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