Tusk Announces Resumption of Border Controls with Germany and Lithuania

Poland will reintroduce temporary controls on the German and Lithuanian borders, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister has said.

He added that the controls will come into force on Monday, July 7. 

“We have decided to restore temporary border controls between Poland and Germany and Poland and Lithuania,” Tusk announced on Tuesday. 

The move comes in response to the German authorities dropping off migrants on the border so that they return to Poland. Under EU rules, migrants must apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter. 

Germany has now returned scores of migrants to Poland who have, the German authorities say, entered Germany illegally. 

‘Patient position exhausted’ 

This has angered the Polish government and led to the imposition of border controls. 

“I warned the Germans back in March; I talked about it several times with the new chancellor,” Tusk said. “I said that Poland’s patient position after Germany introduced unilateral controls is exhausted.” 

German police were spotted dropping migrants on the border and abandoning them in late June. In response, citizens’ patrols were set up over the weekend in border towns, resulting in confrontations with German authorities in some cases. 

Tusk’s government had faced accusations from conservative and nationalist opposition that it had been accepting numerous illegal immigrants being sent back from Germany based on European Union rules. 

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Tusk vowed in mid-June that “If the situation on the border, the pressure [worsens]... I will not hesitate to make a decision to introduce temporary controls. It is likely that we will introduce such partial controls on the border with Germany in the summer.”  

Germany introduced border checks back in October 2023 in order to stop illegal migration. 

German police have returned over 11,000 migrants to Poland between January 2024 and February 2025 under the EU’s Dublin Regulation and bilateral agreements, though there has been much speculation that this figure is in fact much higher.