Overview
- Chancellor Friedrich Merz tied perceived problems in public spaces to migration and cited large-scale returns as the remedy, positioning deportations as a central policy response.
- Reporting cites about 40,000 people as immediately obliged to leave and roughly 180,000 more with legal barriers, underscoring limits to rapid, mass expulsions.
- CSU Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced operations with suspicion-independent checks in city centers and at stations, drawing warnings about racial profiling.
- Demonstrations, including thousands in Leipzig, challenged the rhetoric as a societal rollback that stigmatizes non‑white people.
- Analysts warn the promise of broad expulsions may go unfulfilled and hand political gains to the AfD, even as repatriations, including to Iraq, continue.