An activist working for an organization that helps migrants on the Polish-Belarusian border has been charged with smuggling 15 foreigners to Germany. Her case comes as the result of a multi-layered investigation by the Podlasie Border Guard and the Military Department of the District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw.
According to RMF FM, cited by Do Rzeczy news portal, a Polish suspect was found in possession of numerous documents belonging to migrants.
“Officers searching the activist’s apartment found 62 Temporary Foreigner Identity Certificates. These are issued to migrants who apply for international protection in Poland,” RMF reported.
🇵🇱🇩🇪"That’s how the f**king German police work."
Tensions are rising at German-Polish border crossings as German police are accused of dumping migrants on Polish territory.
However, many simply head right back into Germany. pic.twitter.com/JBFUFM9vI5
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 1, 2025The above-mentioned certificate is the equivalent of an identity card, which entitles the holder and his or her children to stay in Poland for the duration of the proceedings.
However, officers also found guard documents issued to foreigners.
The evidence gathered allowed the activist to be charged with organizing the smuggling of 15 foreigners to Germany in 2022. The woman has pleaded not guilty and faces up to eight years in prison.
Belarus has been directly helping migrants cross into neighboring countries as a form of hybrid warfare for years now. In 2024, the Podlaskie Border Guard recorded nearly 30,000 illegal border crossing attempts from Belarus, detaining 346 organizers and smugglers.
Just this last December, Polish authorities found that nearly 180 illegal migrants had crossed from Belarus into Poland through a tunnel discovered by the Border Guard.
In September of last year, The Insider published an interview with a former member of the Belarusian Border Guard, who provided a behind-the-scenes look at the operation to drop off migrants at the border. According to him, the guards received direct orders from Lukashenko.
“One of the regulations stated that if we spotted a suspicious person in the border zone, we were to fire two warning shots into the air and a third directly at the person. There were severe penalties for breaking any of these rules,” the former officer recalled.
He explained that initially, he transported 20-25 migrants to the border at night, but over time, the number of people increased so much that transports also took place during the day. “The most important thing was to prevent the Lithuanian services from discovering where the migrants were coming from. Transporting migrants became a state priority,” he explained.
“We put them in our vehicles, drove them to the border crossing, and showed them the way with gestures, saying a few words like ‘Europe,’ ‘Germany,’ or ‘Merkel.’ None of us spoke English, and neither did most of them,” he continued.
Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania have all sounded the alarm over the spike in migrants crossing over from Belarus. In 2023, the Lithuanian parliament approved a new law on Tuesday that gives authorities the power to push illegal migrants back across the border during a state of emergency. This was in direct violation of an EU court ruling from 2022 that found detention of such migrants unlawful. At the time, Lithuanian Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė stated, “We repelled an attack organized by the Lukashenko regime, the likes of which Europe has never experienced before.”
