It's been a whole year since the German government introduced a stop on family reunifications as part of its initiatives to gain better control over immigration. The policy, which is meant to be temporary, means that hardly anyone can enter Germany using this legal pathway anymore.
In the 12 months since the German government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz introduced a temporary halt on family reunifications for refugees with a subsidiary protection status, there has been a total of 13 visas issued to bring families together.
Each of those instances involved cases of hardship, according to a report by the dpa news agency.
According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, family reunification programs will remain suspended until at least July 2027 and may be extended beyond this date.
A similar ban on family reunifications was in place from 2016 to 2018, when Germany faced the biggest migratory pressures after more than a million people arrived in Germany in just two years (2015-2016), most of them seeking asylum.
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Reunification ban chiefly affects people with subsidiary protection
Before the introduction of the temporary ban in July 2025, up to 1,000 family members of people in Germany under subsidiary protection used to be allowed to join their relatives each month.
Subsidiary protection is a status afforded to refugees from countries with a high application rate; for years, this status mainly benefitted Syrians who had fled the civil war in their country.
Technically speaking, people under subsidiary protection do not qualify for classic asylum or refugee protection but are nevertheless allowed to remain in Germany due to ongoing threats in their home countries.
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IOM in charge of presenting — and proving — hardship cases
According to the Interior Ministry, the stop on family reunifications is "part of the migration policy shift initiated by the federal government," known as "Migrationswende" in German.
The only way to bring close family members to Germany that remains available for the time being are instances of hardship, in which cases visas may still be issued after a lengthy procedure, which involves intervention by the International Organization for Migration (IOM); in such instances, the UN body is tasked with producing dossiers for each application, which is subsequently forwarded to the Federal Foreign Office for review.
In March, the government said that preliminary reviews for the hardship exemption provision had been completed for 392 families, comprising a total of 1,325 individuals hoping to unite with their loved ones in Germany. However at that point, only two visas had been issued.
The IOM said that at that time, there was still a backlog of 4,029 cases for the organization to process and present to the Foreign Office.
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Pro Asyl: Sharp criticism against divisive government policy
The migrant and refugee rights organization Pro Asyl issued a statement criticizing the government's ban on family reunifications.
"For a year, the federal government has been referring families to a hardship procedure that does not deserve the name, in part because the hurdles are far too high," Pro Asyl Executive Director Helen Rezene said.
According to the charity, some families had been on waiting lists for family reunification for years when the temporary stop was announced last July; according to Pro Asyl, these include families from some of the worst regions devastated by war in the world such as Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
Even cases of extreme hardship are reportedly being rejected by the government since the start of the ban, the NGO added.
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with dpa and AFP