Thuringia: Significantly more unaccompanied minor refugees

The number of refugees in Thuringia has risen this year, not least because of the Ukraine war.

Thuringia: Significantly more unaccompanied minor refugees

The number of refugees in Thuringia has risen this year, not least because of the Ukraine war. This also applies to minors who fled without their parents.

Erfurt (dpa/th) - At the end of the year, significantly more unaccompanied minor refugees arrived in Thuringia than in 2021. By the end of September, 365 children and young people who were fleeing without their parents had already been admitted to the Thuringian municipalities. as can be seen from a response from the state education ministry to a parliamentary question by the CDU state parliamentarian Maik Kowalleck. Most of them come from Ukraine and Afghanistan. In the previous year, 160 unaccompanied minor refugees came to Thuringia.

The care of these minors is usually a special challenge for the youth welfare offices in the municipalities. Among other things, unlike adult refugees, children and young people can no longer be housed on their own in community accommodation or their own apartments. They are therefore accommodated in special dormitories, for example.

According to the Ministry of Education, however, places in these youth welfare institutions are becoming increasingly scarce. A total of eleven districts and urban districts - including the districts of Weimarer Land, Greiz and Sömma and the city of Jena - reported bottlenecks in the accommodation of underage refugees traveling alone at the end of October, according to the ministry's response.

"For Erfurt and Suhl there were concrete indications that the existing accommodation resources were being overloaded." The situation is made particularly difficult by the fact that many providers of such dormitories lack staff, so that not all available places can be occupied. The Ministry of Education is also responsible for youth welfare.

In the long term, however, even the current number of unaccompanied minor refugees in Thuringia is relatively small: According to ministry data, Thuringia took in 1,300 of this group of refugees in 2015, and in 2016 it was almost 1,700 decline in the number of refugees. In the first year of the pandemic, Thuringia took in around 120 children and young people who had fled alone.