In the last decades deportation practices in Germany changed significantly due to changing immigration, asylum and residence law reforms. Through their representatives in the legislative and executive powers, political parties do matter. We hypothesize, though, that their role is bifurcated: While parties regularly hyper-politicize the issue - mostly in a law-and-order mode - at the federal level, the major contestation of deportation takes place through opposing protests and informal practices at the local level, in which parties only play a minor role. And if they play a role, local party structures tend to counteract the positions taken at higher levels by the same parties. The paper offers an empirically solid basis for the evaluation of party politics in this policy field and contributes to its explanation. We draw on a larger project on deportation (1993-2013), including the analysis of media coverage in two daily newspapers and fieldwork.
