When people in acute psychiatric crisis are removed from care
Imagine being woken in a psychiatric ward in the middle of the night. Police officers are at the door. You are handcuffed, placed in a wheelchair, and taken to an airport. Your treatment is ongoing. Your care team has not been told. Your children are waiting at the gate.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. It happened in Switzerland, and it is the kind of case our teams encounter more often than most people would believe. In 2025, we have observed the extremely concerning practice of forced deportations of our clients directly from from psychiatric care, including children’s mental health clinics. These practices raise questions that go to the heart of what a duty of care means: towards patients, towards families, and towards the basic rights that apply to everyone, no matter their legal status.
What concerns us
In recent months, our teams have documented an extremely concerning pattern of forced deportations targeting individuals in positions of extreme vulnerability, a practice that should not exist under the European Convention on Human Rights. Over the last year, an increasing number of families with small children have been removed directly from asylum centers, often deploying ten or more police officers.
Even more alarming, authorities are executing forced deportations of our clients directly from psychiatric facilities, including children’s mental health clinics. Asylum seekers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or serious mental illnesses, such as severe depression, or acute suicidal tendencies, are being taken from hospitals. During these forceful removals, patients have been physically restrained, and deportations have been actively attempted during acute suicidal crises, creating direct, foreseeable risks to life.
Some numbers regarding mental health
The people most affected are disproportionately women and children. Research across 15 countries reveals that roughly one in three refugees and asylum seekers lives with PTSD (eight times higher than the general population) and one in three with depression (three times higher), with rates consistently worse for women.
These cases are not exceptional. Swiss public broadcaster SRF documented one such case in July 2025: an Afghan mother, who was being treated at the UPD Bern after a suicide attempt, was collected by police from the clinic in the middle of the night in March 2023. Her two children and their grandmother were taken in a separate, simultaneous operation from their housing, while still asleep, and brought to Zurich Airport, where the family was held together to await the deportation flight. The woman later described her despair in WhatsApp messages sent in the hours before the flight; volunteers supporting the family called the scene at the clinic «a shock.»
AsyLex immediately took legal action to have the legality of the procedure determined by a court. In particular, we objected to the fact that the mother was forcibly removed from the hospital and that the forced removal was disproportionate and therefore unlawful. The Administrative Court of Bern subsequently ruled that the canton must examine whether the specific circumstances of the deportation and the fact that it was a forced deportation are permissible. Nearly three years after the original deportation attempt in 2023, that review is still pending, and the family’s future remains unresolved.
While psychiatrists and lawyers report several such cases annually, concentrated in German-speaking Switzerland – no official national statistics exist because no authority is required to count them. However, AsyLex alone has documented an increasing number of cases of this kind across several cantons in the last year, including instances of particularly inhumane treatment:
A client taken directly from a clinic and restrained with a cerberus belt throughout the deportation flight.
A client strapped to a wheelchair, gagged, and fitted with a helmet for the journey to the airport. These restraints were described by clinical staff as recurring practice in such deportations.
A client deported just one day after a miscarriage, of which authorities were aware.
A nine-year-old underweight child and his father taken from their asylum center by eight armed police officers for deportation to Croatia; the flight’s medical staff were unaware of the child’s conditions because migration authorities had shredded the medical files.
Alarmingly, despite the Committee Against Torture’s (CAT) reprimands of Switzerland in 2023 for the disproportionate violence used during special flights, these cases are not exceptional. This general trend towards deporting persons directly from psychiatric clinics, disregards their specific needs and vulnerabilities, and exposes them to disproportionate violence throughout expulsions. Several of these return practices were also criticised by NCPT in its latest report published in July 2025.
In this environment, access to justice is not a formality; it is a critical safeguard. When an individual is too unwell to advocate for themselves, a legal team capable of acting within hours is often the only thing standing between them and irreversible harm.
«When someone is removed from psychiatric care mid-treatment, that is not enforcement, it is a grave violation of the principle of proportionality.» – Elena Liechti, Lawyer at AsyLex
What else worries us
Forced returns to Greece. Switzerland is now among the leading countries in Europe sending recognised refugees back to Greece. According to Hellenic Police figures, Switzerland submitted 2,513 readmission requests in 2025, second only to Germany, and 94 percent were approved. The number of people actually returned nearly doubled, from 390 in 2024 to 725 in 2025.
This is not the Greece of holiday brochures. People are not being sent back to a beach in Crete. They are being sent into a reception system that the Federal Administrative Court itself acknowledges is riddled with obstacles, above all in finding housing, even for families with children. And yet, in a landmark ruling from October 2025 that now sets binding precedent for similar cases, the Court decided that difficult living conditions alone are not enough to block a return. Families are expected to have exhausted every possible effort to build a life in Greece, approaching state agencies, charities, even using translation apps, before a deportation can be considered impermissible. In the case underlying that ruling, a family with minor children lost their appeal. The deportation was upheld. No further appeal is possible.
The Swiss Refugee Council (SFH) advises against all transfers to Greece, under Dublin or the bilateral agreement alike, and calls for families and vulnerable people to be exempted entirely. Its assessment is unambiguous: people with protection status in Greece receive almost no support and face homelessness and destitution. For the women and children caught in this system, «return» does not mean safety. It means navigating a system that the courts themselves admit is failing – alone.
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The new EU Pact of Migration and Asylum. On June 12, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum came into force, a reform that sets new rules for how people seeking protection are screened, processed, and either granted asylum or returned. Switzerland is not an EU member, but is bound by the Schengen- and Dublin-agreements through association agreements and has therefore adopted parts of the reform.
What does this mean in practice? New fast-track procedures will be introduced at EU borders, where people will be held in detention-like conditions while their claims are processed in as little as 12 weeks. Crucially, families with children are not automatically exempt. The Swiss Refugee Council takes a critical view of the Pact as a whole, warning that rather than fixing the failures of the current system, it risks cementing them. Switzerland’s Federal Council is still deciding to what extent it will participate.
We will be watching the implementation closely and reporting back on what it means for the people we support.