Chief of Germany’s refugee office resigns

Manfred Schmidt was president of Germany’s Federal Office for Refugees and Migrants, or BAMF, an office of the federal government that has come under criticism for not processing applications for asylum quickly enough and for mishandling resettlement of refugees.

As Germany faces the growing refugee crisis, the country’s top immigration official unexpectedly resigned on Thursday.

Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere is seeking to toughen asylum laws by sending migrants back to the first European Union country they reached and by reducing benefits, under a draft law seen by AFP Thursday. “The dramatically rising number of asylum seekers in Germany poses enormous challenges to the Office as well as to Germany’s states and municipalities”.

Merkel has previously said that there was no limit to the number of refugees Germany would welcome and that the nation expects between 800,000 and 1 million people before the end of 2015.

Police announced that the controls had also been extended along the length of Germany’s frontier with Czech Republic.

“The controls do not mean a closure of our borders”. Four traffickers had been arrested since then.

Hundreds of refugees marched along the highway to cross the Saalbrucke border bridge between Freilassing and Salzburg, after German and Austrian railways suspended services between Salzburg and Munich on Wednesday. “This [border] is now the mainstream, and our efforts are concentrated on it”, a federal police employee said.

Some of them set off on foot towards the German border a few kilometres away.

A police spokesman said they planned to put the refugees on trains so they could be sent to other parts of Germany.