In the first week of January, I received a letter from the Berlin Immigration Office, informing me that I had lost my right of freedom of movement in Germany, due to allegations around my involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. Since I’m a Polish citizen living in Berlin, I knew that deporting an EU national from another EU country is practically impossible. I contacted a lawyer and, given the lack of substantial legal reasoning behind the order, we filed a lawsuit against it, after which I didn’t think much of it.
I later found out that three other people active in the Palestine movement in Berlin, Roberta Murray, Shane O’Brien and Cooper Longbottom, received the same letters. Murray and O’Brien are Irish nationals, Longbottom is American. We understood this as yet another intimidation tactic from the state, which has also violently suppressed protests and arrested activists, and expected a long and dreary but not at all urgent process of fighting our deportation orders.
Then, at the beginning of March, each of our lawyers received on our behalf another letter, declaring that we are to be given until 21 April to voluntarily leave the country or we will be forcibly removed.
The letters cite charges arising from our involvement in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. None of the charges have yet led to a court hearing, yet the deportation letters conclude that we are a threat to public order and national security. There has been no legal process for this decision, and none of us have a criminal record. The reasoning in the letters continues with vague and unfounded accusations of “antisemitism” and supporting “terrorist organisations” – referring to Hamas – as well as its supposed “front organisations in Germany and Europe”.
This is not the first instance of Germany weaponising migration law. Since October 2023, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has unlawfully frozen the processing of all asylum seekers from Gaza. And on 16 April 2025 a federal administrative court in Germany will reportedly decide on a case that could set a precedent for the German state to mass deport Palestinian refugees.
These extreme measures are not a sudden shift or solely a fringe rightwing position. They are the result of a more than year-long campaign by the liberal Ampel coalition – the Social Democratic party (SPD), the Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens – and the German media, calling for mass deportations, widely seen as a response to the growing pro-Palestinian movement, and targeted predominantly at the Arab and Muslim German population.
In November 2024, the deputy parliamentary leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Beatrix von Storch, granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister, took to the Bundestag podium to applaud the passing of the resolution titled Never again is now: protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany, drafted by the Christian Democratic Union of Germany/Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CDU/CSU), the SPD, the FDP and the Green party. She ecstatically claimed that the new antisemitism resolution draws its content from her party’s position.
The resolution, adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, identifies immigration from the Middle East and north Africa, and the “anti-imperialist left” as two of the main sources of antisemitism in Germany. Without new legislation, it directs the state and public institutions to maximally wield executive powers, resulting in a massive crackdown on all forms of pro-Palestinian speech and action. Among suggested methods are heavy scrutiny of all cultural and academic funding, screening of all candidates for university teaching positions, unprecedented expansion of disciplinary measures across universities and last, but not least, utilisation of migration law.
Put in von Storch’s emphatic words, “to send Muslim antisemites back home aboard an aeroplane. Tschüss und nicht auf wiedersehen! [Goodbye and never see you again!]”
My deportation order, as well as those of two other EU citizens, openly cites Germany’s Staatsräson (the idea that Israel’s security is part of Germany’s reason of state, or reason for existence) as a basis for our deportation, saying: “It is in the considerable interest of society and the state that this Staatsräson is always brought to life and that at no time – neither at home nor abroad – do any doubts arise that opposing currents are even tolerated within the federal territory.” The Staatsräson was never a genuine attempt to atone for Germany’s past, but a strategy to first reunify the nation, and currently a way to justify the indefinite suspension of a rights-based order and the unrestrained exercise of executive power.
Murray, O’Brien, Longbottom and I went public with our cases in order to fight this intimidation. Each of our lawyers has filed a lawsuit against our deportation, and we are now filing a motion of interim relief against the 21 April deadline. Since our deportation orders are a test to see how much more repression the state can get away with, it is hard to know what verdict we can expect.
What we do know is that we are in the right, and however Germany decides to act now, we – hopefully with the international community alongside us – will act and fight accordingly. Standing up against the ongoing genocide and calling for a free Palestine is the most important thing for people outside Palestine to do now. The plight of Palestinians and their struggle for self-determination should be enough of a reason for us to stand with them in solidarity. I reject the idea that solidarity is based on fear of something similar happening to us one day.
However grave of a precedent these actions set, we can not and will not let them distract us and implore others not to get discouraged. Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza escalates daily. The four of us from Berlin stand in unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people and their fight for liberation.
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