By going beyond EU requirements and human rights agreements, Germany’s implementation of the CEAS (Common European Asylum System) reform represents a risk that the government is further departing from legal obligations when it comes to migration. In this respect, lawyers, activists, and other advocates have looked to the U.S. as both a warning and an inspiration in shaping their responses to this summer’s migration policy changes. This blog post evaluates how the CEAS implementation is indicative of Germany’s broader trend in migration control, and to what extent these comparisons can help orient strategies going forward.
In early 2026, a surge of media raised alarms that the EU is preparing ICE-style deportations. A campaign from lawyers and organizers warned that the EU is building its own ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), as the EU sought to ramp up deportation powers ahead of the CEAS (Common European Asylum System) reform implementation. Comparisons to ICE, however, sparked criticisms that the EU has been similarly violent in its migration enforcement, certainly not better.
While conducting fieldwork on migration legal organizing in Germany, I observed a rise in U.S.-German partnerships preparing for the implementation of the CEAS reform, beyond the EU return regulation. I attended organizing workshops in Berlin that hosted U.S. lawyers and activists working against ICE, offering guidance to prepare for a similar deportation surge. Similarly, Berlin’s Refugee Law Clinic, which I joined, held a session on the CEAS reform that debated comparisons of ICE to Frontex and the applicability of U.S.-style abolitionist campaigns in a European context. Drawing from six months of participant observation and interviews with practitioners, I contextualize the CEAS implementation and explore how these comparisons can orient strategies going forward. I observed emphasis on situating attacks on migration rights as part of a broader concern for legal systems and at the same time, of developing networks outside of legal work to support actions where legal protections fail. I also suggest challenging both governments’ use of crisis justification to expand state powers.
Implementing CEAS: Germany chooses human rights risks
On 12 June 2026, the CEAS reform, the most recent overhaul of the EU’s asylum system to address its “structural shortcomings,” went into effect. States had until this date to transpose the reform into national law, though the summer will be transitional as the old provisions are phased out.
Germany’s implementation of CEAS will be its “most severe tightening of asylum legislation […] since 1993.” While right-wing politicians claim the CEAS reform will “strengthen confidence in the rule of law,” Germany’s plan only strips legal protections through the expansion of de facto preventive detention, expedited asylum procedures to hasten removals, and additional restrictions on access to procedures. CEAS has created a legal crisis as attorneys and organizations scramble to adjust for its impact on clients and to litigate foreseeable human rights violations.
Ahead of the CEAS implementation, legal organizations put Germany on notice that proposed legislation violates human rights standards. Amnesty and ProAsyl already reported that expanded detention, increased surveillance of detention centers, the expansion of safe third countries, reduction of individual case assessment, denial of social benefits, and new border procedures risk human rights violations. Lawyers are preparing strategic litigation for anticipated violations. As one attorney explained, the reform wiped years of legal work securing standards, and given how slowly litigation moves, it could be a decade before national and regional courts square the CEAS reform against human rights agreements. In the meantime, organizations expect borders will become more violent, review of asylum claims will become shorter, and even more people will be subjected to deprivations of liberty in detention.
Lawyers also raised technical concerns about Germany’s patchy implementation of the already-complex CEAS reform. A recurring concern in interviews and workshops was that administrators will inaccurately apply the new regulations, violating the few protections CEAS still contains because of sheer confusion. Preparation has thus included capacity-building and knowledge-sharing for lawyers, through trainings, template briefs, and workshops. Legal organizations are forced to spend an incredible amount of resources to first make sense of the implementation, delaying their ability to contest the above human rights violations.
Yet, despite the imminence of human rights violations, organizations are in other ways forced to wait and see. For new policies like secondary migration centers (for individuals being transferred within the EU), implementation is up to the federal German states. As discussed in the School of Transnational Organizing’s panel, the instruments of the CEAS reform are also now less specific, leaving more up to local and national interpretation. Organizations are thus stuck waiting to see how each state will approach this, though many have already anticipated the risk of detention of children, much like in the U.S..
Given that the German government is already on notice that its implementation will violate human rights protections, and is proceeding anyway, violations will likely be harder to stop through litigation. Several legal workers thought cases would not end at the administrative court but in appeals to the highest level, requiring follow-up efforts to enforce through sanctions and Untätigskeitsklage (legal action against administration for a failure to act).
Troublingly, Germany’s implementation of CEAS signals a desire to strip human rights and other legal protections in other areas. Interlocutors raised concerns about the rollback of social benefits or the erosion of children’s rights as signaling a departure from human rights compliance. The CEAS implementation harms people on the move, but it also indicates that the German government is moving further from legal obligations. Here, U.S. approaches to an unpredictable, increasingly authoritarian legal environment can be instructive as German lawyers and organizers adapt their work.
CEAS in context: crisis rationales
In the past few years, the German government has subverted legal protections for migration. Most recently, Germany has renewed temporary (unlawful) internal border controls, “a serious infringement of fundamental rights,” and has reinstated a suspension on family reunification that violates several provisions of ECHR. Courts have sometimes acknowledged these decisions as unlawful, rulings the government has sometimes ignored, requiring even the threat of financial sanctions. The German government seems to rule of law when it comes to migration. In this sense, implementing the CEAS reform beyond the scope of the pact and human rights obligations is not unexpected.
Some have pointed out that Germany is modeling aggressive U.S. strategies. Within the past few months, the U.S. government has pursued illegal courses of action in terms of migration. Still, such comparisons can distract from how the present moment is a culmination of antimigration policies crystallizing across late-liberal governments in the past decades. The CEAS reform itself is emblematic of a “migration crisis” rhetoric that the U.S., Germany, and other EU states have been leveraging to expand violent controls.
By declaring migration a security crisis, the German government justified emergency measures to suspend legal protections or expand mobility restrictions. Similarly, the “border crisis” has become a rallying cry for U.S. conservative politicians to justify the suspension of asylum procedures and deadly ICE enforcement. But this rhetoric is not new. The German government has long used the rationale of crisis, emergency, and security to selectively suspend legal requirements as relates to migration, not just with the CEAS implementation. In 1993, the German government framed the Asylkompromiss, which permanently limited access to asylum, as a response to the “emergency” number of incoming refugees of the Balkan wars. The U.S. government has also leveraged moments of crisis to enact violently restrictive immigration policies. The creation of ICE in 2003 was premised on post-September 11 security panic. At the Unframe Festival this fall in Berlin, Lucas Hoffmann and Marley Stefan described 2015 as Europe’s “September 11 moment” in that it precipitated Frontex’s expansion. Following the so-called 2015 Refugee Crisis and an initial liberal reception policy, Germany closed borders, accelerated asylum procedures, and suspended family reunification for certain humanitarian statuses. The European Commission later initiated the CEAS reform as a “response to the ongoing migration and refugee crisis,” claiming this crisis revealed “weaknesses in the design and implementation of the CEAS.”
However, the design of EU migration policy created the crisis. The migration “crisis” is rather the racial violence of the migration legal regime, generating conditions for new crises by selectively removing legal pathways and expanding lethal border control, which governments then name as grounds for further enforcement measures and less judicial review. This tactic of selectively framing a migration “crisis” to facilitate new state powers is thus not unique to either government, but how might strategies to resist such policies be shared across states?
Challenging the implementation: looking to the United States
With the U.S. and Germany taking similar steps to limit migration, looking comparatively can help clarify how to read this moment, so long as it is clear that Germany’s CEAS implementation is a product of its longer trend of escalating migration restrictions. Given the speed, intensity, and illegality of recent measures, German lawyers are turning to U.S. strategic litigation organizations to prepare for these escalating attacks on migration. Already, three themes emerge from these collaborations.
Several new German policies move closer to U.S. practices. Now, for example, Germany will conduct asylum procedures under the fiction of nonentry, a concept the U.S. has long employed. But German lawyers have a tool U.S. ones do not: regional or international human rights bodies. Indeed, with rule of law in Germany in such a state, several interlocutors observed German lawyers are turning more to international human rights litigation. There is a risk of a decision from Strasbourg that weakens existing principles, as states are “countering human rights from within the [European] Convention [on Human Rights] […] to legitimize their migration control policies under human rights law.” Still, human rights litigation remains an avenue unavailable to U.S. lawyers, who instead often challenge migration policy under constitutional or federal law through collective instruments like class action suits. Though class action does not exist in German law, German organizations have built legal collectives for strategic claims, drawing from U.S. models. U.S. lawyers shared in workshops that advocacy campaigns can push the political environment towards migration justice where court rulings cannot. German organizations have been similarly pursuing migration advocacy with casework, so strategy sharing between such spaces makes sense. So while the Trump administration’s policy of prolonged detention is currently the subject of constitutional litigation, Germany’s new detention centers and the CEAS reform’s extended detention limits might need a different legal strategy, but there might be room to share in approaches or advocacy, especially as the courts become less reliable enforcers of legal protections.
Firstly, Berlin-based lawyers I interviewed perceived U.S. lawyers as offering a realistic approach against the rightwing political shift. Lawyers also remarked on the need for strategies that appeal to the democratic rule of law generally, to contest Germany’s erosion of legal agreements and sidestepping of court rulings. The closing session of this year’s MeDiMi conference, discussing the human rights approach to migration, encouraged building wider coalitions with “rule of law” arguments, a suggestion that echoes U.S. developments. Panelists expressed concerns about how the German far-right is learning from the U.S. and moving towards the same trend, as did most interlocutors and panelists at two other migration law events. The U.S. is seen as a warning of Germany’s potential political future, with the Trump administration directly challenging constitutional protections and showing an unwillingness to be bound by legal obligations. To prevent such a “rule of law crisis” and to activate new supporters, lawyers and legal scholars suggested campaigns that locate migration rights within a need to protect legal rights and institutions.
Secondly, to respond to this summer’s legal changes, German and U.S. organizers have coordinated activist workshops to discuss practical strategies, such as neighborhood initiatives. In one training, U.S. activists recommended building apartment-level communication groups as a way to share support during imminent deportations (though these are not without risks). Other U.S. lawyers reported still leveraging legal defense but that often these actions were too late, and situations required more urgent responses. In Germany too, what stops deportations is rarely legal intervention, and workshops emphasized the need for continued direct support. With deportations becoming more frequent, developing structures to assist people targeted and affected is even more critical, as the U.S. shows.
Lastly, beyond the recent changes, some U.S.-European collaborations have highlighted how migration controls and their justifications are structurally similar. One interlocutor described discussing with a U.S. lawyer policies that made current U.S. migration enforcement violence possible: safe third country concepts, externalization of refugee protection, and border asylum procedures. These policies have been longstanding features of German and EU migration control for decades, expanded by the CEAS reform. It is not enough to look at the policy similarities, but to challenge the shared rhetoric of irregular migration crises that justify such expanded authority for violent exclusion and exceptions to legal protection. Comparing the longer arc of U.S. and Germany migration policy, recent convergences stem partly from patterns of restricting rights through the logics of migration crisis.
Conclusion
Germany’s CEAS implementation will test the ability of legal organizations, national courts, and international tribunals to keep Germany to its human rights obligations. In the meantime, looking to the U.S. can provide creative options for when legal enforcement fails. Given escalating authoritarian trends in migration control, U.S. and German legal activists should combat the similar use of crisis justification to authorize state violence. By comparing both border regimes, other similarities also crystallize as potential for joint mobilizations—such as a historical reliance on racialized labor exploitation or corporate border profiteering. Zooming out to why both governments have reached a similar approach to migration control provides more room for shared projects that target the structures, not just the new policies.