In recent days, a group of conservative Polish politicians, mainly from the conservative PiS party, have been kicking up a storm, demanding concrete action to address Poland’s growing loss of control over migrants crossing its western and eastern borders.
Last Saturday, chairman of the PiS in Parliament Mariusz Błaszczak remarked on the “very disturbing reports” coming from Białowieża, a small village in the northeastern province of Podlaskie, bordering Belarus.
He said residents “reported groups of illegal migrants, primarily young men, who have been receiving aid from an organization that has been obstructing the military and Border Guard for years. Meanwhile, in western Poland, there are increasing reports of migrants being pushed across the border from Germany.”
“Does anyone still have control over this situation? The government needs to wake up from its lethargy before it is too late. The fight against illegal migration requires decisive action, not empty declarations. Get to work!” he added.
Służby w akcji (Service in Action), which reports on Poland’s internal security, highlighted the situation in the village of Czerlonka near Białowieża in that same province.
Having been asked for help by that village’s councilor as well as by Białowieża authorities to bring their problems to the public’s attention “since no one wants to help them,” they said on X:
“Almost every day, for most of the day, migrants who have illegally crossed the border linger at the bus stop. People are afraid to go out in the evenings, and because the bus stop is constantly occupied, children are afraid to stand there to catch their school bus.”
According to local authorities in Białowieża, the situation is the result of actions by organizations helping illegal migrants, such as the Podlasie Volunteer Humanitarian Service (Podlasie OPH).
They allegedly give out a WhatsApp number to migrants, leading to that bus stop—about 5 kilometers from the border—becoming a place for them to gather.
Once there, they fill out power of attorney documents and asylum applications. Subsequently, they wait, sometimes for hours, for the Border Guard to fetch them and take them to the center of town.
Service in Action also claims it has information that the Podlasie Volunteer Humanitarian Service personally brings illegal immigrants to the stop from other locations, among which, they suspect, are nearby forests.
According to Service in Action, Polish police are unable to do anything about the situation since the migrants are in a public space, while the Border Guard says it does what it can, but is currently experiencing staff shortages as well as a high workload at the border.
Janusz Kowalski, a member of the national-conservative Sovereign Poland (Suwerenna Polska) party, also raised the alarm, pointing out that groups of illegal migrants have been seen on the streets of the province’s capital city of Białystok.
“This is not funny. This is the future that [Prime Minister] Donald Tusk, [Mayor of Warsaw] Rafał Trzaskowski, and [Speaker of the Polish Parliament] Szymon Hołownia are preparing for the Poles. Polish women will be molested on Polish streets. After dark, Poles will be afraid to go outside. Crime will increase. Attacks with machetes [in what could be a reference to neighboring Germany’s now unignorable knife crime problem] will become common. It has begun,” Kowalski said on X.
While the situation at Poland’s eastern border with Belarus is the gravest, since it constitutes a more active security threat, Poland’s western border with Germany, which itself is struggling to get a handle on its migrant problem, has also seen an uptick in non-sanctioned border crossings.
Last Friday, a German police car reportedly crossed the border into the village of Osinów Dolny where it dropped off a family of immigrants from the Middle East.
The Polish Border Guard has since strongly condemned the action, calling it a “violation of the principles of cooperation between both services and the law regulating the transfer of persons,” and that German services “cannot make such decisions arbitrarily.”
On Monday, it announced that its Commander-in-Chief of the Border Guard would discuss the matter with the German president of the Federal Police presidium.
That same day, MPs from the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, including chairman of the PiS in Parliament Mariusz Błaszczak, paid a visit to the Polish Border Guard HQ, which they called a “parliamentary intervention.”
During a press conference, Błaszczak, who was the former head of the Ministry of National Defense, said he and his colleagues were taking this action in order to take the Border Guard to task, and also those centers where illegal migrants are housed.
“We will take to task those institutions responsible for the security of our country in order to trigger the right attitude on the part of the authorities that are paralyzed today,” Błaszczak said, adding:
“We are asking questions to the Commander-in-Chief of the Border Guard about how many illegal migrants were sent back from Germany to Poland, on what basis does the German side act, on what basis did it lead to this return? How many illegal migrants were detained at the eastern border? How many of them applied for asylum in Poland? Were non-governmental organizations active in the process of helping migrants illegally crossing the Polish border? What were these organizations? We will also ask about the sources of financing of these organizations, because the picture that emerges from the whole situation indicates that these organizations participate in illegal human trafficking, import people, or take part in this practice, which resembles sabotage. We will also ask about the occupancy rate in migrant centers.”
It remains to be seen how forthcoming the Commander-in-Chief will be in his answers—and whether the incident on the German-Polish border spells increased tensions between the two nations.
