The death of 24-year-old Klaudia K. from Toruń, who was attacked in mid-June in a city park by a Venezuelan national, is part of a crisis that seems to be accelerating across Poland. This, of course, refers to the migration crisis and the situation on our western border, through which — with surprising and difficult-to-explain passivity from Polish authorities — people of unknown origin are being pushed into Poland, writes Wojciech Mucha in Gazeta Polska.
This terrifying incident in Toruń is a clear sign that everything experts have warned about for years — uncontrolled, large-scale arrivals of people from the far corners of the world — is already happening, and it’s claiming blood.
The Venezuelan man arrived in Poland in February 2025. He was unemployed and staying in the country illegally — his residence permit had expired, but no one seemed to take notice. There’s no system, after all, in which his name would suddenly light up red with a note to at least check on his status.
“Nothing’s happening — yet”
Against this backdrop, statements repeated like a mantra by politicians and commentators aligned with the government — that “there are still few incidents,” that there’s a “witch hunt” or “hysteria” — sound increasingly absurd. The Toruń killing already echoes similar events in Western Europe, where reckless migration policies enabled criminals to remain in host countries. Now in Poland, we’re seeing “silent marches” against migrant violence. Just as in Western Europe, Poles are starting to take matters into their own hands — defending their local communities and even the national borders. Media reports, firsthand accounts, and civilian patrols from the Border Defense Movement (ROG) reveal that such incidents — far from isolated — are being reported almost daily. It has all escalated very quickly.
It’s not just the tragic case in Toruń, but also daily incidents. For instance, just last week, in the middle of the night on a bridge in Gubin, German officials attempted to push a terrified man into Poland. In amateur footage resembling scenes from a spy thriller, a man — let go by Germans standing with arms crossed — timidly walks across the bridge, only to be stopped by Polish residents who deny him entry (he has no ID or spare clothes and appears homeless). The firm stance of the Poles forces him to turn back. Reluctantly, he collapses at the feet of visibly annoyed German officers, frustrated that they couldn’t offload the “problem.”
More and more images are emerging from Polish towns and cities showing people of unknown origin on the streets. And — unsurprisingly — the situation is not at all like what Civic Platform politicians, such as Róża Thun, claimed in 2019: that if “5,000 newcomers” arrived in Nowa Huta, no one would even notice. Turns out, even one newcomer — like the Senegalese man expelled from a lake in Katowice — stands out. The Germans apologized for that incident and carried on as before.
Even Prime Minister Donald Tusk acknowledged something was wrong last year. Following one of the first widely publicized pushbacks of migrants to Poland, he tweeted on June 17, 2024: “I’ll be speaking shortly with Chancellor Scholz (…). This must be clarified in detail.” At the time, Deputy Interior Minister Maciek Duszczyk, responsible for migration policy, said: “The Germans sent an explanatory letter, apologized — it was absolutely a one-off incident.”
That’s how Tusk explained it. But a year has passed, much has changed (including in Berlin, where Olaf Scholz was replaced by Friedrich Merz — no fan of Tusk), and similar incidents have only become more frequent. Officially, Germany insists that those being “returned” to Poland had entered Germany from Polish territory — often via the Belarus border.
In practice, however, there’s no way to verify this. Authorities don’t check even mobile phone logs to confirm whether the devices — and their owners — were ever in Poland. Instead, officials accept declarations about originating from war-torn regions and take migrants’ stated ages at face value — leading to confirmed cases of African adults being housed in children’s homes or SOS villages.
According to MP Dariusz Matecki (Law and Justice), the estimated age of such individuals is sometimes confirmed using an imprecise method: X-raying hand bones. What’s more, as footage from Telewizja Republika shows, Polish services appear to be under top-down orders to accept these individuals from the Germans without much scrutiny — almost as if following KO MP Iwona Hartwich’s infamous directive: “Just let these people into Poland already! We’ll figure out who they are later! That’s what your services are for!”
German police data — reported by TVN24 — give us a rough idea of the scale. As of July 3, 2025, “from January to May, Germany turned back 2,765 individuals at the Polish border, with the highest number in May — 708.” The largest groups were reportedly citizens of Ukraine, Afghanistan, Georgia, Colombia, and Ethiopia. For comparison: 20 people were turned back in 2021, 54 in 2022, 1,705 in 2023, and a staggering 9,369 in 2024.
The Nail in the Coffin
But how do you categorize incidents like the one in Gubin, where an undocumented individual was nearly forced into Poland — stopped only by resolute locals? What about the photos of Bundespolizei patrol cars turning around at the sight of Poles, seen on forest trails and river crossings along the border? And how many people have actually been “dumped” without any records — and why is this happening at all?
There are many questions, but politically, only one matters: Will this situation — now clearly out of the government’s control — be one of the final nails in the coffin for the December 13 coalition? All signs point to yes.
It’s now been a quarter since Tusk’s government ratings began a dramatic decline. Even government-friendly CBOS reported in June that satisfaction with Tusk’s leadership “has reached its lowest point, and dissatisfaction its highest, since the start of this government,” hitting 58%. For comparison: in October 2023, 53% of Poles were dissatisfied with Morawiecki’s government. In the latest IBRiS poll, Civic Platform is supported by just 25.8% of respondents — a 7.6-point drop since the election. It seems unlikely they’ll recover — there’s no political fuel in sight.
The ruling coalition itself appears trapped in a political death spiral, and its attacks on both the opposition and grassroots border activists only deepen the crisis. No wonder: instead of securing the border, they spent weeks obsessing over alleged election fraud, naively hoping to overturn the voters’ verdict. It didn’t work. And while border controls with Germany were reintroduced last Monday, it’s clear this is merely a cosmetic patch on a dam full of holes.
All of this is unfolding on the eve of Karol Nawrocki’s inauguration as President of Poland. One of his first announced decisions? To deal with the EU migration pact — possibly through a unilateral withdrawal. What that means in practice remains unclear, but one thing is certain: events are moving fast, and confrontation is now inevitable. Everything Tusk hoped to escape — while “closing the system” — has caught up with him. And it seems that what’s being closed now is not the system, but the lid on his political career.