A surge in people smuggling has led the state of Saxony in eastern Germany to send a larger number of police officers to the areas along the borders with Poland and the Czech Republic.
State Interior Minister, Armin Schuster, has said that Saxony police officers are working together with German federal police in order to halt migrant smuggling.
As Schuster explains, the state had experienced a significant increase in cross-border crimes, stressing that migrants with children are being abandoned in the middle of the night by smugglers.
Furthermore, the Minister noted that Riot police and Saxony border police are expected to carry out more controls, especially in the next three months.
Earlier this year, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz unfolded plans to tighten controls at its borders, urging the EU partners to construct asylum centers around the bloc.
Police officers said that since the country decided to apply stricter measures at its border with Austria, a larger number of people are reaching Germany from the Polish border.
Back then, Andreas Roßkopf of the police trade union GdP, the Guardian, said that police were against tightening border checks, remembering the situation at the Austrian border in 2015 when the number of arrivals was too large to be managed.
“We’re talking about several thousand kilometers of internal Schengen border that would need to be controlled. But the federal police is technically and staff-wise not in the position to be able to carry out permanent controls on the borders of Germany’s neighbors,” he told the Guardian.
In May this year, the German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser met with her Polish Mariusz Kaminski to discuss tightening border controls.
During a visit to the Polish border town in Swiecko, Faeser said that she wanted to see strengthened migration controls on the German-Polish border. According to her, stricter controls would also be applied on trains and on-air traffic.
Authorities in Poland are also dealing with a large number of migrants who are reaching the country from Belarus.
Last month, the country’s leaders agreed to send a total of 500 police forces, as well as 5,000 border guards and 2,000 soldiers, to the country’s eastern border.
Besides, Polish authorities warned that they may completely close its common border with Belarus in case of an incident, including the Russian Wagner paramilitary group.
In addition to Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, authorities said they may also take similar steps, emphasizing that the situation had become more dangerous.
