Nearly 11 years ago, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed, “We can do this!” as she affirmed that Germany was up to the task of integrating hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria seeking asylum in the country.
Today, Faridoon Tofan, a 46-year-old Afghan refugee with no criminal record, sits in a cell at Munich Airport and listens to planes fly by. Any one of them could be another deportation flight.
Tofan fled Afghanistan in 2022 to escape threats from the Taliban and seek asylum in Germany, but now, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees is working with the Taliban to deport him. His lawyer, Anna Frölich, says that if he returns, the Taliban will likely either kill or imprison him, and if he is lucky enough to make it out of the airport, he must go into hiding. “This is not a singular case,” Frölich told Inkstick.
Germany has deported nearly 200 Afghan nationals since it resumed limited cooperation with the country, which was taken over by the Taliban in 2021. Until late last month, all of these deportations were of individuals with criminal records, but that changed when another noncriminal detainee was deported from the Munich Airport. According to Frölich, Tofan was supposed to be on that flight, but she was able to file an emergency appeal in his asylum case that bought him a few more weeks.
Germany suspended diplomatic cooperation with Afghanistan when the Taliban seized control of the country’s government in 2021. This encompassed the closure of the German embassy in Kabul and the pausing of deportations to Afghanistan. In the following years, the German government has gradually reopened channels of negotiation and coordination with the country, despite the tenuous relationship with its government. Part of these concerted efforts was the resumption of deportations in 2024. At the outset, Germany worked with Qatar as a third-party country through which it could fly deportees and facilitate negotiations.
Shortly after his election in 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz decided to forego the Qatari middleman and called for direct negotiations with the Taliban, which, among other things, led to the start of direct deportations to Afghanistan later that year. In response to a parliamentary inquiry last month, the Bundestag confirmed that it was working with “representatives of the de facto government” of Afghanistan, but that the cooperation does “not imply any political recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.”
The same response says that the deportations “will also be carried out to Afghanistan, with the initial focus being on the repatriation of criminals.”
According to internal documents from state interior ministries, the German Federal Police lifted its restrictions on only presenting criminal offenders for deportations in early July, confirming that this trend was a reflection of a new operating procedure.
The groundwork for this process, Frölich says, was laid in 2025, when the German Interior Ministry began rejecting most asylum applications from Afghan refugees.
Dr. Michelle Lynn Kahn, an associate professor of History at the University of Richmond who specializes in modern European history, said she sees the policy as one of numerous concessions given by the coalition government to Germany’s increasingly prevalent far-right base.
Kahn argues that the country’s Willkommenskultur ended as quickly as it began, with backlash to former Chancellor Merkel’s open border policy almost immediately drawing widespread ire. “It’s often talked about like Willkommenskultur has been a defining German political ideology for the past ten years,” said Kahn, “when in reality, there was a huge backlash, even within Merkel’s own party.”
She says that the more consistent trend is the long-standing anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany in the postwar period — and rampant Islamophobia — that informed the reflexive restrictions on immigration that defined the country’s politics in the past decade.
“This is clearly part of a worldwide pattern of cracking down increasingly on segments of immigrant populations that are perceived to be unwanted. And largely, that has to do with the fact that they are considered non-white, non-European, and non-Christian.”
These policies have left Afghan nationals living in Germany walking a legal tightrope without protection under the law. If they break the law, they would likely be slated for deportation. The same goes for noncriminal Afghans who attempt to leave the country.
That is exactly what happened to Tofan when he visited Rome.
Tofan was a respected engineer in Kabul before he left the country. According to Frölich, his firm secured high-profile contracts with the local government to build schools and police stations. His success, however, caught the eye of the Taliban in the early 2000s. At the time, the group was still looking for benefactors, so they approached Tofan about cooperating with them.
“He ignored them,” said Frölich. “It was no big problem because at the time, the Taliban were in the mountains. But the closer 2021 came, they got stronger, and when they came to power, he lost most of his work.”
After the takeover, Taliban representatives visited Tofan’s home, asking for his whereabouts, prompting him to leave his family’s home and eventually the country, before making his way to Germany in 2022.
Without a European degree, Tofan could only secure gig work as a cleaner or service worker, sending much of his income back to his wife and children, as Taliban restrictions prevent his wife from working, and his sons are too young to get a job. When he arrived in Germany, Tofan applied for asylum, but the immigration court denied his application in 2025. Since he was a non-criminal and deportations were still limited, he was able to remain under Duldung — a German status similar to deferred action in the US. Tofan was informed of the ruling, but the court handling his case in Bavaria never gave him the document indicating his new status.
Tofan traveled to Rome in April, and, according to Frölich, on the way back, border police questioned him in Potsdam and reviewed his identity card, which stated that he was still in asylum proceedings. But when their system showed that he was denied asylum, they detained him and moved him to a dedicated deportee facility at Munich Airport.
Frölich told Inkstick that Federal Police brought Tofan to Berlin for questioning and identification. When he arrived, he was brought face-to-face with a representative of the Taliban, who looked over his documents and questioned him about his activities in Germany after fleeing Afghanistan.
Leaving the hearing and fearing for his safety upon return to Afghanistan, Frölich said that Tofan a panic attack that triggered his asthma and caused him to collapse.
After Tofan’s interrogation, his wife called, saying that representatives from the Taliban came ame to the home where his wife and children were staying and asked for his sons, the oldest of whom is 14.
Frölich said Tofan had told her that he is afraid the Taliban men are looking for his sons to recruit them, as with many adolescent boys in Afghanistan.
Frölich and her team used this as the basis of a new asylum application, in which they argued that the Taliban’s visit to his home was proof the group had not forgotten their dispute with Tofan, and that his life was still in danger if he was repatriated.
The foreign ministry swiftly denied the application. Frölich immediately appealed. “It’s crazy to say that in the past you had some problems with the Taliban, but that was a long time ago,” said Frölich. “But that’s what our foreign ministry thinks.”
Nina Alizadeh Marandi, asylum law expert at Amnesty International in Germany, told Inkstick that any deportation to Afghanistan amounts to a violation of human rights, given the Taliban’s dismantling of civil rights and use of state violence.
She criticized the Bundestag’s “hyperfixation on high deportation numbers,” calling it evidence that right-wing, anti-immigration political groups such as the AfD are being allowed to set the tone of federal immigration and refugee policy. “Opening a door for blackmailing from a group like the Taliban is extremely dangerous and concerning,” said Marandi.
“This is clearly part of a worldwide pattern of cracking down increasingly on segments of immigrant populations that are perceived to be unwanted. And largely, that has to do with the fact that they are considered non-white, non-European, and non-Christian.”
Dr. Michelle Lynn Kahn
Frölich likened the German government’s willingness to cooperate with the Taliban to its recent embrace of Ahmed al-Sharaa, who became the de facto leader of Syria’s government after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. Around one million Syrian migrants came to Germany during the Syrian Civil War in the 2010s, prompting then-Chancellor Merkel to open the country’s borders.
During a press conference with al-Sharaa in March, Merz announced his controversial plan to repatriate 80% of Syrians living in Germany. German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said a few months earlier in November 2025 that Syrian refugees who have integrated into the German community will not be deported. But federal courts have already made it easier for authorities to deny Syrian asylum applications, which were recently resumed after a pause following the regime change.
Muzaffer Öztürkyilmaz, a representative of The Refugee Council of Lower Saxony, said that he was anxious to see that German airlines had resumed direct flights to the country since the Assad regime collapsed last year, fearing that they may be signaling future deportations. “We are in fear of even more deportations,” said Öztürkyilmaz, whose organization helped a 19-year-old Afghan refugee escape deportation in July; he also had no criminal record.
Today, Tofan is confined to just a few square meters, with a bath and a toilet. Once a day, he is allowed to go out in the garden, which is small and surrounded by walls, where he can see the sky filled with planes flying back and forth.
“From a psychological point of view, it is horrible, because the next plane you hear may be your plane,” said Frölich. “[He] sees people being detained at four in the morning and removed from their rooms to be taken to their deportation flight.”
Tofan and Frölich submitted a new asylum request after the Taliban visited his family, which was once again denied. They once again appealed the denial just in time to prevent him from being deported during the last week of July.
Another deportation flight to Afghanistan is scheduled for the last week of August. If Tofan’s appeal is not processed by then, Frölich says he may be placed on that flight.
“We are sitting here every day, waiting for a decision from the court and praying,” said Frölich.
