On October 31st, Nazira Khairzad, a 21-year old woman from Afghanistan, turned to her older sister, Nazima, as they waited to board a flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Palma de Mallorca, Spain. “What about if the police catch me and send me back to Italy?” Nazima recalls her sister saying.
They were the only Afghans in sight. Around them, Spaniards on their way home crowded the gate. Nazima and Nazira were three days away from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc, a technical 26-kilometer race through the Serra de Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca. Nazira’s legs still ached from the Frankfurt marathon, which she’d run a week before, finishing with a positive split. If all went as planned, the rapid turnaround would be worth it. The Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc would bring staggering views of the Mediterranean–and more opportunities to race abroad. One hiccup threatened to upend these dreams. In Germany, Nazira is a non-resident. For her, international travel is illegal.
“It’s legal,” Nazima recalls telling her sister. “You already have the documents.” When Nazira went through security in Frankfurt am Main, she showed the guard the refugee travel document she obtained in Italy, where she obtained asylum in 2021. Not her German ID with its red slash across the biometric page. Nazima, who has German asylum, worries about Nazira’s ability to stay in Germany, where her whole family now lives. But as her sister–marathoner, goalkeeper, and woman caught in a web of bureaucratic contradictions–approached the gate agent, Nazima kept her concerns quiet.
“I have duldung,” Nazira told me. “It’s worse than deport,” her older sister, Nazima, added. At a café along the Main River, the three of us peered over Nazira’s ID. “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung),” it read in German. And under that: “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!”
Hundreds of thousands of people in Germany hold ID’s that look like Nazira’s. Duldung, which denies an asylum seeker residency but protects her from deportation, is one way Germany has tried to accommodate–without too warm a welcome–the staggering amount of refugees entering the country. The number of asylum seekers in Germany has skyrocketed in recent years, multiplying seven-fold from 2007 to 2024, according to the Federal Statistical Office. Germany has stamped approvals at an impressive clip. As of late 2024, there were 2,706,320 refugees with an approved asylum case, just 170,970, with rejections.
Nazira and 177,609 others hang in a peculiar in-between, their cases denied, but their presence sanctioned under “duldung,” or “toleration.” Her deportation order, by duldung standards, is on hold. But as anti-immigrant sentiment swells in Germany, Nazira is skeptical of this temporary protection. “They can send police and they can send me back to Italy,” she told me. “It happened for some people I know.”
