Border guards in Poland’s northeastern Podlaskie province said on Thursday that over 20 migrants illegally entered the country near the town of Michałowo after digging a tunnel under a security barrier on the Polish-Belarusian border.
Border guards said that the group that used the tunnel was made up of Afghan nationals, but did not specify whether all of them were detained.
The Podlaskie section of Poland’s Border Guard also recorded two days in a row that saw over 100 attempted crossings near several towns and villages in the region, including by citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Cameroon, Algeria and Eritrea.
In a press release on Friday, the Polish Border Guard said that migrants had thrown stones and liquid-filled bottles at officers near the village of Mielnik a day after similar incidents were reported near Narewka. It added that attacks on Polish officers and vehicles were occurring “almost every day” on the border with Belarus.
Border guards also reported that two people-smugglers had been detained in connection with attempted frontier crossings, including a Belarusian national near the town of Lipsk in Podlaskie and a Polish citizen found transporting three Iranian migrants near Narewka.
An orchestrated crisis
Poland has faced a migrant crisis on its borders since late 2021, when thousands of mostly Middle Eastern and African migrants began attempting to cross into Poland and Lithuania illegally via Belarus.
Poland has faced criticism from human rights organizations that say the authorities are using illegal pushback tactics to send migrants back into Belarus without giving them the chance to apply for asylum.
Dozens of migrants are thought to have died in border regions since 2021, often caught between the Polish and Belarusian sides with nowhere to go.
Last year, a Polish soldier was killed after being stabbed by a migrant.
Warsaw and Brussels have long maintained that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a Kremlin ally, is behind the influx of migrants. They accuse him of orchestrating the migrant crisis to destabilize the EU.
Ramped up security
Poland has ramped up border security in recent years, including building a large steel barrier on sections of both its frontier with Belarus and its border with the Russian exclave Kaliningrad. It has also established temporary exclusion zones and granted authorities extra powers in border areas.
The Podlaskie Border Guard, which is responsible for a large part of the Polish-Belarusian border, said that it has recorded about 15,000 illegal crossing attempts since the beginning of 2025.
On Monday, Poland reintroduced checks on its borders with fellow EU member states Germany and Lithuania in an attempt to tighten its control on immigration after Warsaw accused German authorities of returning illegal migrants to Poland and leaving them stranded.
