WARSAW — When the war began in February 2022 and Poland opened its border to people fleeing it, 94 percent of Poles told pollsters they approved. In July this year, for the first time in the two decades CBOS has asked the question, more of them opposed taking in Ukrainian refugees than supported it. On Monday the Interior Ministry went on X to advertise how many foreigners it had removed from the country.
Around 6,000 people were deported in the first half of 2026, the ministry said, roughly 30 percent more than in the same period last year. It set that against 3,000 for the whole of 2023 and 10,000 for 2025. “The efficiency of the Border Guard and Polish police, combined with a tough migration policy, is producing tangible results,” the ministry wrote. “The number of deportations from Poland is breaking records.” The policy of restoring control and ensuring security, it added, was in full swing.
Ukrainian nationals are the largest group among those removed. The reason the ministry gives for that is not the one the framing invites. Ukrainians make up the overwhelming majority of foreigners living in Poland, so they make up the largest share of almost any statistic about foreigners living in Poland. A deputy minister put it plainly: there are simply more Ukrainians in the country than any other nationality. After them come citizens of Georgia, Belarus, Moldova and Colombia.
The grounds are similarly undramatic. The most common reason for a removal is that a foreigner lacks documentation permitting them to stay, followed by exceeding the time allowed in the Schengen area. These are administrative failures, not criminal ones, and a residence permit that lapses produces the same entry in the statistics as anything else.
The figures also need handling with some care, because deportation is not one thing. Polish reporting on the same half-year data put the number of foreigners who left the country through organised returns at just over 5,640, a figure that does not map cleanly onto 6,000 removals, and the ministry has not published a breakdown showing how many of the six thousand were Ukrainian. What is being counted, and at what stage of the process, changes the number.
What is not in doubt is the direction of Polish opinion. CBOS put its regular questionnaire to a representative sample of 938 adults between July 2 and July 12, using a mix of face-to-face, telephone and online interviews. Fifty-two percent said Poland should not go on accepting people fleeing the fighting, against 42 percent who said it should, a six-point shift from the previous reading and the first time in the series that opponents have outnumbered supporters. Fifty-four percent said the assistance given to Ukrainian refugees was too generous.
That is a fall from 94 percent to 42 percent in a little over four years, in the country that took in more Ukrainians than any other and whose border towns organised the reception effort largely by themselves in the first weeks. The decline began around mid-2023 and has not reversed since.
Poland still hosts the largest Ukrainian population in the European Union, which is what makes the ministry’s choice of message notable rather than the statistics themselves. A department of Donald Tusk’s government is promoting enforcement volume, in a month when a majority of the electorate has for the first time said the country is doing too much, about a population that is in Poland because of a war that has not ended.
Several things the data do not show. The ministry has published no Ukrainian-specific figure, so the size of the largest group is unstated. There is nothing on how many of the removals were physically enforced as against people leaving once ordered to, no figure for appeals lodged or upheld, and no indication of how many of those returned went back to regions of Ukraine still under fire. The ministry’s post was a statement of volume. It did not say where anybody went.
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