More than half of all migrants who were ordered to leave Germany in the first five months of 2018 went missing, and their deportations have not been executed, according to a report of the German federal police.

In January – May 2018, nearly 24,000 people were ordered by the German authorities to be returned to their home country, based on the police document reported by the Welt am Sonntag, as cited by DW.

However, only about 11,000 deportations were carried out. Some 12,800 deportations failed, including 11,500 of people who were “not found” at the address they had been registered. It is unknown how many of them went into permanent hiding.

In the rest of the 1,300 cases of failed deportation, the authorities abandoned the execution of the order for various reason. In 500 of those cases, there was active or passive resistance, an increase of 200% compared with the same period of 2017.

Recent data from the EU statistical body Eurostat showed that in 2017 Germany had the highest number of migrants ordered to leave, and that the number of migrants ordered to be deported had grown in the entire Union.

The report on the failed deportations comes against the backdrop of simmering political tensions in the German governing coalition spearheaded by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer in a row with Chancellor Angela Merkel. The ruling coalition’s breakup was recently avoided only through complex talks and a compromise deal.

However, the German federal police report reveals that while the number of deportation orders increased by 17%, the number of actual deportations declined by 4%.

The migrants in Germany found to be most likely to resist deportation are from Nigeria and Guinea – over 60% of the migrants from them resisted, followed by the citizens of Somalia (over 50% resisted), and the citizens of Syria (more than 40% resisted).

The figure for asylum-seekers from Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Morocco, Iraq, and Eritrea is over 30%.

State and local authorities in Germany were criticized by the chairman of the federal police union, Ernst Walter, for not doing a better job on the deportations.

“It creates an enormous amount of work for the federal police that every second person to be deported is ultimately not delivered by the responsible state and local authorities,” Walter said.

In his words, the only way to prevent migrants order to leave from disappearing is to “make much greater use of deportation detention.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s Labor Minister Hubertus Heil, who compes from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), criticized the states for apparently increasing deportations of allegedly integrated refugees.

“I sometimes have the feeling that the wrong people are forced to leave Germany,” the SPD politician told the Augsburger Allgemeine, arguing that was bad for those companies that have invested in the training and hiring of asylum seekers.

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