Matteo Salvini halts migrant readmissions from Germany over Mediterranean rescue ships

Salvini halts transfers at Trento rally

Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini declared that Italy will not accept any migrant returns from Germany until further notice. Salvini made the announcement on 22 August 2026 during a party gathering in the northern Italian city of Trento. The leader of the right-wing Lega party, which forms part of the governing three-party coalition under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, stated that Italy would defy newly enacted European Union rules governing migrant transfers.

Germany has no right to send back even a single illegal immigrant to us as long as German NGO ships are operating in the Mediterranean to bring thousands of illegal immigrants ashore in Italy and Europe.

The dispute over Mediterranean rescue ships

The political clash between the governments in Rome and Berlin focuses on the handling of secondary migrants who arrive in Italy and subsequently move across internal European borders into Germany. Salvini justified his decision by pointing directly to German aid organizations that operate civilian rescue vessels across the Mediterranean. These ships pick up refugees at sea and transport them to Italian ports, after which a portion of the arrivals continue their journey northward. Salvini framed the German organizations as active contributors to the arrival numbers, insisting that Berlin cannot return asylum seekers while German-linked vessels continue offloading migrants on Italian territory.

Enforcement friction under the Dublin system

The confrontation follows the implementation of the European Union Asylum and Migration Pact, which entered into force in mid-June 2026. The pact relies on the Dublin Regulation, an established European legal framework that dictates that an asylum application must be submitted and evaluated in the member state that the migrant first entered. Under these updated mechanisms, Germany and several other member states intended to resume returning migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Italy before traveling onward. However, the Italian government in Rome has refused to take back a single migrant from Germany since the new asylum pact came into force.

The refusal continues a multi-year policy of rejecting readmission requests from other member states. Official Italian figures reveal that Italy has turned down approximately 80,000 readmission requests from European partner nations since 2023. Rome has consistently defended the blanket rejections by arguing that the Italian national reception system is completely overloaded and incapable of accommodating returned migrants.

Legal background and planned ministerial talks

Salvini previously pursued aggressive measures against civilian rescue operations during his earlier term as interior minister. In 2019, he prevented a humanitarian rescue ship carrying refugees from docking, keeping the vessel stranded off the Italian coast for multiple days. That incident prompted state prosecutors to seek a six-year prison term for Salvini, a legal battle that culminated in 2025 when Italy's supreme court acquitted him.

Resolving the bilateral rift between Rome and Berlin now falls to the interior ministries of both countries. According to Italian media reports, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi and German Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt of the Christian Social Union (CSU) are scheduled to hold talks in the near future to discuss secondary migration and the deadlock over readmission procedures.