According to EU Helpers, these data provide insight into a contentious policy that the former Law and Justice (PiS) government put into place in August 2021 in reaction to a spike in border crossings from Belarus, primarily by people from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
During the aforementioned time, border authorities did not maintain detailed data on these instances; instead, they classified them as "prevented border crossings," a more general term. According to official statistics, Polish border guards stopped 33,781 attempted border crossings in 2021 and 12,157 in 2022, as Notes from Poland indicates. On July 5, 2023, the distinction in returns as a distinct category first surfaced.
In response to inquiries from the left-wing Razem party, Poland's Interior Ministry stated that 6,070 verified instances of pushbacks occurred between that date and January 16, 2024.
Additionally, Info Migrants states that Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Duszczyk, a member of the recently appointed government that replaced PiS in mid-December 2023, emphasized a notable decrease in rejections throughout the administration's duration.
Compared to the same period the previous year, there was a discernible drop of 81% in the number of people who were subject to decisions requiring them to leave Polish territory between December 13, 2023, and January 3, 2024.
One month ago, 101 non-governmental organizations, including members of the European Council for Refugees and Emigrants (ECRE), sent a petition to Prime Minister Donald Tusk in an attempt to solve the persistent problem of systematic delays along Poland's borders.
The Polish prime minister was urged in the petition to act swiftly to put an end to what it called the "gross violations of migrants' rights" occurring at the Polish-Belarusian border. The border wall that separated Belarus and Poland was inefficient, as evidenced by the Polish border guard's results, which showed that more than 60% of unauthorized crossings into Poland went undetected.
Moreover, the figures highlight how serious the situation is. In the first nine months of last year, almost 30,000 people managed to cross the border from Belarus into Poland in spite of the wall. Unbelievably, a sizable portion of these migrants—at least 13,000, according to reports—then traveled through Poland to get to Germany.
The report also provides insight into enforcement actions, demonstrating that between January and September of the same year, 17,488 Belarusian nationals who made unauthorized entry attempts into Poland were apprehended by Polish authorities.
