Schengen travel: Germany extends border control for six more months

Germany has extended its temporary border controls for another six months, the European Commission said.

Earlier implemented on March 16, 2025, the border checks were to come to an end on September 15. However, according to the latest announcement, checks will now continue until March 15, 2026.

The step is being taken in response to “serious threats to public security and order posed by continued high levels of irregular migration and migrant smuggling, and the strain on the asylum reception system”, the European Commission said.

Checkpoints will be put in place at land borders with France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Czechia, and Poland.

The move comes after the new interior minister Alexander Dobrindt from the conservative Christian Social Union ordered stricter controls on Germany's borders to curb irregular immigration.

Non-EU citizens without a visa are to be turned back, including asylum seekers without valid entry documents and those who have already submitted an asylum application in another EU country.

Earlier this month, Poland introduced border controls with Germany and Lithuania in response to growing criticism of Berlin's decision to push thousands of migrants, who it claimed had crossed the border illegally, back to Poland.

In a separate development, Berlin said that more than 200 Afghans waiting to be offered sanctuary in Germany had been deported by Pakistan to their Taliban-run home country in recent days.

The German government was urging Islamabad to allow them back, said foreign ministry spokesman Josef Hinterseher, as an aid group voiced alarm for their fate and those of others.

The deportees are part of a group previously offered refuge in Germany but now caught between Chancellor Friedrich Merz's tougher immigration policy and a wave of expulsions from Pakistan.

Pakistani police had recently arrested "around 450" Afghans who were previously accepted under the German scheme for people at risk from the Taliban, Hinterseher told reporters.

Of those, "211 people, according to our current information, have been deported to Afghanistan," he said.

Another "245 people were allowed to leave camps" in Pakistan where they had been gathered prior to their scheduled deportation, he said.

"We are continuing to talk to Pakistan to facilitate the return of those who have already been deported."

Last week two German rights groups launched legal proceedings against two German ministers, accusing them of "abandonment and failure to render assistance" to those hoping for German visas under the scheme.

Germany set up the programme under former chancellor Olaf Scholz in the wake of the Taliban's 2021 takeover, to help Afghans who had worked with German institutions and their families.

It also included people deemed particularly threatened by the Taliban, including journalists and human rights activists.

However, the programme has been put on hold as part of a stricter immigration policy brought in under Merz, who took office in May, leaving some 2,000 Afghans stranded in Pakistan waiting for German visas.

With inputs from AFP