A female employee of the immigration authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, has been charged, along with her husband, with human trafficking after helping more than 20 Indian men to migrate to Germany, reports Die Welt.
37-year-old Subha L. and her husband, who were arrested in December 2025, are said to belong to a human-trafficking gang that has used a very specific method, according to the German newspaper.
The group is said to have arranged sham marriages between Indian men and Bulgarian women in Cyprus. L. is said to have personally processed and approved the subsequent applications for residence permits in Cologne. She and her husband are said to have received a total of around 76,000 euros for this.
The first name Subha suggests that the 37-year-old is herself of Indian origin.
Migration between countries is driven, amongst other things, by diaspora effects, whereby people tend to move to countries where there are already many people of the same origin as themselves.
When members of the same diaspora as a migrant are responsible for processing that person’s application for residence, it is easy to suspect unlawful preferential treatment. In this case, the suspicion is so concrete that it has resulted in criminal prosecution.
The federal states have delegated authority in most immigration cases in Germany. However, Detlef Seif, the CDU’s spokesperson on immigration policy in the Bundestag, is now calling for the state authority in Cologne to be placed under the supervision of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).
In 2023, another employee at the immigration authority in Cologne was sentenced to four and a half years’ imprisonment for forging certificates for Syrians, reports Die Welt.
These cases raise questions about the scale of the phenomenon, not in Germany, but in Europe as a whole.
