Poland’s opposition Conservatives (PiS) have announced they want to create a ministry for immigration which will be charged with the task of speedy deportations, within 72 hours of the arrival of illegal migrants, while ‘citizen patrol’ groups have organised on the border with Germany to stop illegal migrants entering the country.
“If PiS wins the election and returns to power, a special ministry for illegal immigration will be established. All these ‘engineers’ will be deported within 72 hours, or at the latest within one to two weeks”, former PiS prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki told independent conservative broadcaster TV Republika on June 28.
Morawiecki singled out Germany as the problem in the migration crisis evolving on Poland’s western border. Over the last two years, Germany has sent back thousands of migrants, prompting a growing backlash in Poland.
“We will no longer let Germany treat us the way they have. This ministry will have special powers. There will be an outcry in Brussels and Berlin, but Poland will not pay the price for the foolishness of EU bureaucrats,” he said in response to reports that German police and border guards have been releasing illegal migrants inside Poland’s border.
PiS and Confederation, the other right-wing opposition party, have both been arguing that the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk have been passive over the issue.
Morawiecki pledged that if PiS is returned to power in 2027, the expected year of the general election, or before, “a special ministry for illegal immigration will be created” with powers to deport migrants and protect the border.
“We’re dealing with something unprecedented, the Polish western border is as full of holes as Swiss cheese. People are being forced to organise themselves because Donald Tusk is afraid to send forces to that border. Just as I, as prime minister, built a wall on the eastern border, if we return to power, the state will be active again. I will ensure the western border is sealed if I have the chance,” he argued.
The former Polish PM acknowledged that EU institutions would not support PiS’s approach.
“There will be uproar in Brussels and Berlin, but Poland will not pay the price for the EU’s bureaucratic stupidity. If you break the law, you will be expelled. We will build a special facility near the German border so that all illegal migrants can see what awaits them,” Morawiecki warned.
According to locals in western Poland, German police and border guards have been engaged in pushbacks with migrants being released into Poland on the suspicion that this is the location from which they entered Germany. The individuals in question are reported as claiming to be from states such as Somalia to which deportation is impossible.
Groups of ‘citizen patrols’ have gathered on the Polish side of the border with Germany to oppose returns of migrants whom the German authorities claim to have entered illegally from Poland.
On June 28 around 200 Szczecin residents blocked a road by walking back and forth across a pedestrian crossing and groups of football fans from nearby towns of Police and Świnoujście organised similar “citizen patrols” on the German border, displaying banners saying, “Stop illegal immigration.”
Poland’s interior ministry has pushed back against claims being made by the anti-migrant campaigners.
“The claim that Germany is transferring migrants to Poland is untrue. We are mostly dealing with foreigners who were in Poland and who then attempt to enter Germany but are denied entry due to border controls”, wrote the ministry in their statement of June 28.
The ministry’s spokesman later added that the problem had been caused by the previous PiS government’s liberal visa regime and that transfers of asylum seekers from Germany to Poland under the EU’s Dublin Regulation were at a higher level during the PiS government’s time than was the case today.
Official data shows that between January 2024 and February 2025 Germany returned 11,000 migrants to Poland on the basis of the Dublin Regulation’s provision for returning asylum seekers back to where their claim had been made. The readmission procedure for returning those who crossed illegally from Poland and via the turning back of migrants at the border was because they did not have the required visas to enter Germany.
Back in March, Tusk threatened that Poland would stop implementing the Dublin Agreement and in June he threatened to reintroduce partial border controls in response to the migrants transfers from Germany continuing.
However, Poland has not withdrawn from the Dublin agreement and border controls have not been introduced, prompting the head of the PiS parliamentary caucus to ask on June 29: “Where is the ‘sealed border’ Tusk promised?” and to accuse the prime minister of surrendering Polish security “in the name of subservience to Berlin.”
