Bavaria's AfD suggests a police unit similar to US immigration agency ICE for tracking asylum seekers and deportations, amid criticism of ICE's harsh tactics and recent deadly incidents.
Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland or AfD party in Bavaria is proposing a specialised police unit modelled on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to track asylum seekers and coordinate deportations, according to internal documents.
At the press conference following the winter conference of the Bavarian state organisation, AfD parliamentary group leader Katrin Ebner-Steiner initially avoided questions about this model.
While Ebner-Steiner explained that the unit's organisational structure was still open, the fact that the concept paper envisages an orientation "similar to the ICE" only became known later, when the documents were made available to media outlets after repeated requests.
ICE, or United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been strongly criticised for its increasingly tough approach to arrests, deportations and other operations.
Recently, several incidents have triggered attention and protests.
On Saturday, a 37-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti, was shot dead by an ICE officer seconds after being sprayed with a chemical irritant and thrown to the icy ground.
Renee Good, also 37, was killed by an immigration officer while sitting in her car on 7 January. Trump's administration has excluded local investigators from examining her death.
Another ICE operation in Minnesota caused demonstrations when federal officers took a five-year-old boy and his father into custody.
In a separate case, a detained man died in custody after reportedly being strangled.
Curfew for asylum seekers
Beyond the deportation unit, the Bavarian AfD's position paper calls for mandatory community service for all asylum seekers and an evening curfew, which Ebner-Steiner said would "lead to an increase in public safety."
The party also proposes removing immigrant children struggling with German from mainstream schools and placing them in separate institutions.
Religious education for these students would be replaced with "cultural education and values education" to prevent "a lack of discipline and violence in our schools," according to state parliament member Markus Walbrunn.
The Bavarian AfD has been classified as a suspected right-wing extremist organisation by the state's Office for the Protection of the Constitution since 2022, a designation upheld by Munich's Administrative Court in June 2024.
The court found sufficient evidence of efforts against Germany's free democratic basic order, particularly regarding human dignity and democratic principles.
Authorities cited the party's ethno-cultural understanding of nationhood, anti-foreigner and anti-Muslim positions, occasional antisemitism, systematic disparagement of state institutions, and calls for "remigration" including of German citizens with immigrant backgrounds.
Several Bavarian AfD functionaries have maintained ties to the right-wing extremist Identitarian Movement and its leader Martin Sellner, with multiple party representatives publicly promoting Sellner's remigration concept or attending networking events.
Individual AfD members of parliament are now under surveillance, including state legislator René Dierkes, whom authorities view as a "hinge function" between the AfD and the far right due to potential anti-constitutional activities.
The party is challenging the surveillance through legal proceedings that remain pending.
In Germany's 2025 federal election, the AfD became Bavaria's second-strongest party with approximately 19% of the vote, doubling its 2021 result. The Christian Social Union under Markus Söder retained first place with 37.2%.