The new emergency accommodation for refugees on the old airport site in Berlin-Tegel is about to start. The tent complex with 900 places will be ready for operation from Friday evening, said a spokesman for the integration administration in response to a dpa request in the afternoon. [If you want all the latest news live on your phone, we recommend our app, which you can download here for Apple and Android devices.]
According to him, however, this does not mean that newly arriving refugees are already moving in there. The emergency shelter is intended as a reserve and only comes into play when all other options have been exhausted.
Because only a few of the 24,500 places in refugee accommodation are still available, Integration Senator Katja Kipping (left) put stage 1 of an emergency plan into effect on Wednesday. The core of this step is the opening of the tent complex, which had been set up a long time ago at the Ukraine arrival center in Tegel, just in case.
It was originally intended for the temporary accommodation of war refugees from the Ukraine, but has not been used for this until now. Operator is the German Red Cross.
Kipping cited the fact that most federal states had recently stopped accepting asylum seekers as the reason for their actions. Therefore, the distribution of the newcomers to the countries according to the so-called Königsteiner key no longer works properly.
But since new asylum seekers keep arriving in Germany, many of them in the capital, Berlin now has to accommodate more. This exacerbates the already tense situation here. The Berlin Refugee Council had criticized Kipping’s actions. Tents are unsuitable for accommodating people seeking protection. (dpa)
