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Al Jazeera America
SZEGED, Hungary — Hungary closed the main entry point on its border with Serbia on Monday after a record number of refugees surged into the country, racing to enter the European Union amid a dramatic tightening of border security.Workers also rushed to complete a 13-foot-high steel fence on the Hungary-Serbia border as police rounded up arriving refugees and ushered them onto waiting trains and buses that took them directly to the Austrian frontier.
At around 4:30 p.m. local time, police blocked the rail line that for months has been the main unofficial border crossing in the area. Scores of refugees quickly gathered at the police cordon, unsure what would happen next, as a police helicopter circled low overhead. It was not immediately clear if police would re-open the crossing, or seek to seal it completely, but they directed refugees to a nearby official border crossing, where they would be registered.
Spiegel Online
Evrim, a refugee from the ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo, has wrapped herself in a wool blanket, her red sweatshirt no longer offering sufficient protection against the cold. The young woman with dyed-blonde hair would rather spend the night in front of Vienna's Westbahnhof Station than sleep in an emergency shelter. She is planning on taking the very first train to Germany the next morning."We heard that Germany has closed the border," Evrim says. But she doesn't really want to believe it. She heard the news from Mohammed, who is also from Aleppo and is part of the group of 15 Kurds from Syria she is traveling with. The group coalesced on the refugee trail, which leads from Turkey across the Western Balkans to Hungary and beyond. Mohammed, for his part, heard the news from a British journalist who had interviewed the group in the early evening right after they crossed into Austria from Hungary. "Maybe he misunderstood (the journalist)," Evrim says.
The Guardian
Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has cut a chequered figure this summer: scorned for taking Greece to the wall, and praised for welcoming large numbers of Syrians to Germany. But nowhere and at no time has she been more of an enigma than she was in Vienna’s central station on Monday where crowds of refugees struggled to reconcile how the same “Mama Merkel” had opened Germany’s borders one week, and closed them again barely eight days later – leaving those at the station stranded.“She said she will bring big boats from Turkey to rescue Syrians!” said Maria, a Syrian who fled the bombs of Damascus six weeks ago. “And now why has she closed the border?” asked Maria’s daughter.
Reuters
Two decades of frontier-free travel across Europe unraveled on Monday as countries re-established border controls in the face of an unprecedented influx of migrants, which broke the record for the most arrivals by land in a single day.Germany's surprise decision to restore border controls on Sunday had a swift domino effect, prompting neighbors to impose checks at their own frontiers as thousands of refugees pressed north and west across the continent while European Union ministers argued in Brussels over how to share the burden.
Austria said it would dispatch its military to help the police carry out checks at the border with Hungary after thousands of migrants crossed on foot overnight, filling up emergency accommodation nearby, including tents at the frontier.
New York Times
BERLIN — Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands introduced border controls on Monday, as Germany’s decision over the weekend to set up checks began to ripple across a bloc struggling to deal with the influx of migrants coming to the Continent.In Hungary, the authorities said that a near-record 5,353 migrants had crossed into the country from Serbia before noon on Monday — even as Budapest continued to seal off that border with the construction of a 109-mile fence made with razor wire.
Around 50 police officers, wearing riot gear and equipped with pepper spray, converged Monday afternoon on the train tracks linking the villages of Roszke, Hungary and Horgos, Serbia, which thousands of migrants had used to cross in recent days. An official in a bright yellow jacket turned away migrants seeking to enter Hungary.
BBC
EU interior ministers meeting in Brussels have agreed in principle to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers around the 28-nation bloc.However, there was no agreement on a plan for mandatory quotas which some states are strongly opposed to.
Earlier, more European countries introduced temporary border checks, hours after Germany imposed controls on its border with Austria.
Tough new border controls come into force in the next hour in Hungary.
On Monday, police in Hungary completed a fence designed to stop thousands of migrants who have been crossing the border from Serbia.
The new laws allow police deployed along the border to arrest anyone considered an illegal immigrant or who tries to breach the new fence.