More than 1,300 pages of internal records from Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior disclose that the government’s policy of turning away asylum seekers at the borders is hardly legally defensible, even from the perspective of its own officials. Since 2024, ministry staff have repeatedly expressed doubts about implementing such a measure.
The magazine “Der Spiegel” obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. A note from the B2 section-responsible for “leadership and operational matters of the Federal Police”-dated 28 August 2024 stated that directly refusing asylum seekers, as the ruling coalition had demanded earlier, would be “professionally associated with significant legal and political risks”. At that time Nancy Faeser of the SPD was Interior Minister.
In a briefing from 9 September 2024, a civil servant who later became head of the migration department under Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), wrote that the refusal of asylum seekers is “potentially toxic” and “unviable under EU law”. To bypass that obstacle, Germany would need to officially declare that public order or internal security is dramatically threatened.
Another ministry memo from the same period noted that it was the job of Länder and municipalities to provide evidence for a purported crisis. “Such data is not currently available, neither for accommodation situations nor for areas such as integration, where offers have been massively expanded, nor for kindergartens, schools, medical care, police, and so on”.
On request from civil State Secretary Bernd Krösser, staff were asked in late January 2025 how likely it was that the border practice would be halted by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the short term. The assessment was that the possibility was not entirely unlikely, but would take at least nine months. Krösser commented that this suggested a longer duration than previously assumed, a position that could strengthen the case of those who also believed such an approach would not survive before the ECJ, yet argued the measure is “made simply because it takes time until it must be revoked and it effectively operates during that time”.
In early March 2025, after the ruling coalition’s success in the federal election, the EU Law office drafted another comprehensive note on the legal situation. Doubts whether Germany could bypass EU law to refuse asylum seekers remained unchanged. The records state that a member state had never previously succeeded in this at the ECJ.
On 7 May 2025, the new Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt signed an instruction to the Federal Police, authorizing the denial of entry to asylum seekers. Since then, on average, 113 people per month have been turned back despite submitting an asylum claim.