Pro-refugee protesters forming a human chain and chanting humanitarian slogans failed to stop the biggest deportation from Sweden in recent years.
About a hundred people gathered outside the Migration Board’s premises in Märsta, north of Stockholm, in an attempt to block the expulsion of some two dozen rejected Afghan asylum seekers to Kabul, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported.
Border police officer Patrik Engström said that with 25 people expelled on a single occasion, this was the largest deportation in recent years.
While 23 of the cases were referred to by the Migration Board, two were crime-related. According to Engström, the deportees were exclusively men aged 18 and over.
“The reason why there are so many is that we have handled many cases lately and have had a lot of people sitting in custody for a long time,” Engström told Dagens Nyheter.
Engström partly attributed this to previous regulations, which granted temporary immunity from expulsion to applicants for high school studies.
“From the police side, I believe it’s important to emphasise that our mission is to enforce government decisions while ensuring that people who want to hear opinions against such decisions can do so. That’s what we did yesterday,” Engström said.
Police spokeswoman Anna Westberg said the transfer from Märsta to Arlanda Airport took place “relatively calmly,” although a small number of the roughly 100 protesters were escorted from the scene after trying to form a ring and prevent the bus from leaving the detention centre.