Return Center Kærshovedgård
by Nikolaj Kristensen, photos Michala Clante Bendixen
The conditions at Kærshovedgård severely limit the residents’ opportunities to lead meaningful and prosperous lives. They are intended to pressure the residents into leaving the country, even though this, for most residents, is no option at all.
Residents must comply with strict and meaningless monitoring requirements that, in practice, deprive them of their freedom, even though they have never committed a crime or have already served their sentences.
The residents are often referred to as hardened criminals, but only slightly more than half of the residents have committed crimes since being placed at Kærshovedgård, and 88% of those crimes are violations of the monitoring requirements. 99% of the crimes do not endanger other people, and police data show that there has been no significant increase in crime in the area surrounding Kærshovedgård since the center opened in 2016.
Residents and their living conditions
Kærshovedgård is a former prison located in a forest in the municipality of Ikast-Brande. Located 7 kilometers from the nearest train station, the only public transportation there is to book a Flextaxi.
The center houses between 200 and 300 residents without legal residency in Denmark. It is reserved for adults without children who are unable or unwilling to leave the country voluntarily, and the residents are almost exclusively men. Some of them have lived there since the return center opened in 2016. Previously, single women were also housed here (as described in our 2023 report 'They Don't Know How Much Stress We Have'), but since 2024 they have been placed at Return Center Avnstrup alongside families and women with children.
The residents at Kærshovedgård generally fall into one of three categories.
- Rejected asylum seekers who have sought protection in Denmark but whom the Danish authorities have determined to not be in need of protection. They are also considered by the authorities to not be actively cooperating in their departure.
- Persons sentenced to deportation who have had their residence permits revoked due to criminal activity. If they’ve been sentenced to prison, they will have completed their sentences prior to being transferred to Kærshovedgård. In practice, it may be difficult or impossible to carry out a deportation of these individuals.
- Persons on tolerated residence who have been sentenced to deportation for criminal activity but who cannot be deported as they face persecution, torture, or death penalty in their home country.
The residents are not incarcerated and those with prison sentences have already served their sentences.
Some residents have unresolved cases – either an appeal against deportation or a pending asylum case – and are actually permitted to stay in Denmark in the meantime. Read more about these groups in the end note. Our 2025 article 'Welcome to Kærshovedgård' was written by a resident with an open asylum case.
Kærshovedgård opened as a return center in 2016 under then-Minister of Immigration and Integration Inger Støjberg with the aim of “encouraging” foreign nationals without legal residence in Denmark to leave the country. Prior to that, the three groups of residents lived in regular asylum centers, most of them at Center Sandholm. The facility is operated by the Danish Prison Service and is fenced in.
Although Kærshovedgård is not a prison, and the residents are not officially imprisoned, residents, in practice, have little opportunity to leave the facility due to its remote location and the fact that residents are prohibited from driving and are required to stay at the center at night and report daily to authorities.
Experts have described Kærshovedgård as an “open prison” where residents actually face worse conditions than inmates in actual open prisons. Thet also have no idea how long their stay will last. Where a prison stay focuses on rehabilitation, purposeful daily routines and future possibilities, the focus of return centers is the opposite – to make life as unbearable as possible for the people living there.
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> Read the subpage to this article where two volunteers who have been going to the center during many years have described their main points of concern over the living conditions of the residents, and taken photos.
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The residents are severely limited in their possibilities to lead the life they want. The communal kitchens were closed when the facility transitioned from prison to return center, and cooking is prohibited in the rooms. Residents are not allowed to own kitchen appliances – not even a coffee maker or an electric kettle to make coffee or tea. Meals are served in the cafeteria three times a day at fixed times, and the food is delivered from outside.
With few exceptions, residents are not allowed to work or participate in unpaid internships, and only a few have access to the center’s internal school. They are not allowed to have an income, and, with the exception of those on tolerated residence who receive a small amount of “pocket money,” they receive no benefits whatsoever. As a result, they have no money to pay for things such as cell phones or transportation. They also don’t have access to the public health care system. Instead, the Red Cross operates a health clinic at the center. Residents are also subject to a number of monitoring requirements.
Monitoring requirements
Residents at Kærshovedgård are subject to daily residency and reporting requirements. This means that they must spend the night at the center (they must stay there between 11.00 p.m. and 6.00 a.m.) and that they must check in with the Danish Return Agency if they have legitimate reasons for their absence.
Previously, only individuals on tolerated residence were required to report daily while rejected asylum seekers and those sentenced to deportation were required to report three times a week. But with the latest restrictions, which took effect in 2026, the daily reporting requirement now applies to all residents. The restrictions also meant that residents lost the right to drive. These restrictions were put in place to prevent the residents “to the greatest extent possible” from participating in society, as the Ministry of Immigration and Integration stated on its website. Then-Minister of Immigration and Integration, Rasmus Stoklund, said the residents’ lives “must be as dreary and boring as possible, and we must be able to monitor their whereabouts every day.”
It is a severe limitation of personal freedom considering the residents have either never committed a crime or have already served their sentences. All other residents in the country have their record cleared once they’ve served their sentence. But for the residents of Kærshovedgård, there’s added punishment with no end in sight. Their ability to maintain family life is limited, and according to experts, Denmark is teetering on the edge of violating the European Convention on Human Rights.
Many residents have children and partners who are legally residing in Denmark. But the residents must obtain prior permission to visit their families, and they are only allowed to be out for a maximum of two consecutive nights and four nights in total over a calendar month.
If residents fail to comply with the monitoring requirements – for example, if their bus or train is canceled or delayed – they risk imprisonment. The penalty is escalated with each violation – from one week in prison for first time offenses to, in case of repeat offenses, up to four years. The logic is akin to getting a higher fine for every time you get caught riding a bike without lights. The harsh punishment related for violating monitoring requirements place an unnecessarily large burden on the courts and prisons.
Under Danish law, foreign nationals must be deported if sentenced any unconditional prison sentence and certain conditional prison sentences, unless doing so would clearly violate international conventions (for example, if the convicted person has strong ties to Denmark or close family members residing in the country). Several of the people sentences to deportation at Kærshovedgård are rejected asylum seekers who have been reclassified due to a prison sentence for failing to comply with the monitoring requirements.
What that means is that there are people who have done nothing more than to ask Denmark for protection – and have been denied – who are being imprisoned and criminalized solely for failing to report to the Danish authorities in a timely manner. For people who have lived multiple years in Kærshovedgård, it is practically impossible to not have violated these requirements, even having done their utmost to follow the rules. Even worse, the electronic registration at the center malfunctions from time to time, and the residents receive no receipt as proof that they have registered, called in, or been present.
The purpose of these draconic conditions is to pressure people living there to leave Denmark. It is inhumane, especially considering that many of the residents – regardless of what the Danish authorities have assessed – are convinced that their lives are in danger in their home countries. People on tolerated residence even have been told by the Danish authorities that they too believe that these people’s lives are at risk if they go home. Some of the residents would like to return home or travel to a third country but do not have or cannot obtain the necessary documents. Read about Paul from Liberia whom no countries would accept. In our 2021 report 'A Firm Hand in the Back', we've detailed 11 different Danish return center cases. The stress they are put under at the center is making them ill - some of them suffering already from the trauma of fleeing - and is leading to increased substance abuse.
In conclusion, the control measures make no sense and cost a lot of money. If someone is staying at Kærshovedgård, it is because family ties bind them to Denmark, or because they simply cannot travel elsewhere, or because they still hold out hope that their case will be reopened and overturned - which happens just as often as forced deportations. Otherwise, they would have left the place a long time ago to go back home or to live underground somewhere in Europe. Most of the people placed in Kærshovedgård disappear shortly after arrival or never show up at all.
As part of its so-called deportation reform, the outgoing coalition government had plans to require residents of Kærshovedgård to wear ankle monitors if they repeatedly violated the monitoring requirements. The current government has set out to implement the reform. This will, in all likelihood, lead to more residents at Kærshovedgård, as deportations in many cases won’t be possible.
Crime
In recent years, several politicians have called for a “lock on Kærshovedgård”, thereby turning the “open prison” into a closed one. The idea has been supported by Morten Messerschmidt of the Danish People’s Party and Inger Støjberg of the Denmark Democrats, and even Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, has said that she would like to see a lock on Kærshovedgård (though she added that it would have to be done in compliance with international responsibilities, making it in effect impossible).
This is often justified by citing the residents’ criminality, even though the residents have either never committed a crime or have already served their sentences.
A much-cited TV2 article from March 2026 shows the residents to have been found guilty of nearly 11,500 criminal offenses. The article is based on a confidential document from the Director of Public Prosecutions, and Refugees Welcome have not been able to gain access to the document.
However, the article paints an incomplete picture of the residents’ criminal activity.
The 11,483 offenses mentioned in the article occurred over a ten-year period (committed by individuals who were residing at Kærshovedgård in October 2025). However, the article does not specify whether the offenses occurred before or after the residents in question were placed in Kærshovedgård. It is therefore impossible to say if the residents were residing at Kærshovedgård at the time of the crime. Since criminal activity is a contributing factor to why some of the residents – those sentenced to deportation and those on tolerated residence – end up in Kærshovedgård in the first place, there is nothing particularly surprising in demonstrating that there’s a criminal history among the residents.
Only a minor share of the offenses (467 of them, or 4.1%) involve crimes endangering other people, such as assault, robbery, homicide, arson, and sex crimes. Most of the offenses (approx.7,100, or 62%) relate to specific provisions under the Aliens Act, particularly violations of the monitoring requirements associated with admission to Kærshovedgård.
The remaining approx. 3,900 offenses are not specified in further detail.
CRIMINAL OFFENSES COMMITTED BY RESIDENTS OVER A 10-YEAR PERIOD ACCORDING TO THE TV2 ARTICLE
A similar report produced by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration in September 2025, provides a better insight into what other violations have been committed. However, it covers only 45 residents on tolerated residence at the time.
Once again, it is clear that the vast majority (85.6%) of the violations relate to the monitoring requirements.
Similar to the TV2 article, the report doesn’t specify if the crimes were committed before or after the individuals arrived at Kærshovedgård.
CRIMINAL OFFENSES COMMITTED BY PERSONS ON TOLERATED RESIDENCE CURRENTLY LIVING AT KÆRSHOVEDGÅRD OVER A 10-YEAR PERIOD
If instead we look solely on crimes committed by residents after they were places at the center – and thus excluding any offenses the residents may have committed prior to that and for which they have already served their sentences – 58% have committed some sort of crime. Here, too, the overwhelming majority of offenses involve failure to comply with monitoring requirements. These offenses account for 87.8% of all offenses. Notably, these figures predate the tightening of the reporting requirement that took effect at the beginning of 2026.
Only 1.2% of the offenses involve crimes endangering other people. Thus, 98.8% of the residents’ criminal activity did not endanger other people.
Half of the criminal offenses consist of various forms of shoplifting, particularly in grocery stores or supermarkets. This is not too surprising given that the residents are not allowed to earn money, and that the only food they get is what is served in the cafeteria at specific times thrice daily. Inmates in prisons (including Ellebæk) have the opportunity to work and earn a little money for such things as cigarettes, phone cards, candy, or perfumes. The residents of Kærshovedgård do not.
CRIMINAL OFFENSES COMMITTED FOLLOWING INITIAL ADMISSION TO KÆRSHOVEDGÅRD
The graph covers all 1,292 individuals who have been housed at Kærshovedgård from March 21, 2016, to May 19, 2022. Only offenses committed after initial admission to the center are included. A total of 22,012 criminal offenses were committed.
Data from the Central and Western Jutland Police show that, in general, there has been no increase in reported crime in the area surrounding Kærshovedgård since the center opened in 2016. On the contrary, the number of reported criminal offenses has remained relatively stable.
There have been increases in certain types of crime, particularly shoplifting and bicycle theft, which is a logical consequence of the conditions imposed on residents. The police figures also show that there has been significant increase in the number of so-called incidents and investigations recorded by the police. These include, for example, cases where the police were called, where they conducted a search, or where a person failed to show at the facility. The increase may be due to a heightened focus on crime in the area but has not resulted in more criminal cases being filed.
REPORTED CRIMES IN THE AREA SURROUNDING KÆRSHOVEDGÅRD
The graph shows reported offenses under the Danish Penal Code, the Narcotics Act, the Weapons Act, and the Knife Act within a six-kilometer radius of the Kærshovedgård Return Center but does not include offenses within the facility itself. Cases in the vicinity of Kærshovedgård are not necessarily related to Kærshovedgård.
Taken together, these statistics paint a picture of residents committing violent crimes to a lesser extent after being placed in Kærshovedgård. After initial admission to the facility 9 out of 10 crimes are violations of monitoring requirements, and 98.8% of crimes committed did not endanger other people.
Furthermore, the figures do not indicate a general increase in crime in the area surrounding Kærshovedgård since its opening in 2016. Nevertheless, since 2023, neighbors to the center have been eligible to receive financial compensation of either DKK 50,000 or DKK 150,000, depending on how close they live to the facility.
Recommendations
At Refugees Welcome, we believe that the conditions imposed on residents at Return Center Kærshovedgård constitute a violation the European Convention on Human Rights Articles 3 (inhuman treatment) and 5 (deprivation of liberty), as well as the absolute prohibition against torture. We believe that all Danish return centers should be closed, as they have no positive effects.
The current policy criminalizes otherwise law-abiding rejected asylum seekers and imposes a disproportionate additional penalty on those who have already served their sentences for criminal offenses. The result is not an increase in returns, but rather more people going off the radar, alongside undue human suffering and high costs for the state.
The conditions at Kærshovedgård have drawn criticism from a wide range of organizations and experts, for example in a joint statement back in 2019. The center has also been criticized in several reports on Denmark by international bodies such as the Council of Europe and the UN human rights committees. The Danish Institute for Human Rights has repeatedly expressed serious concerns over the years, most recently in a consultation response from 2025.
Read more about the conditions at Kærshovedgård and the pressure that authorities exert on residents in our 2021 report ‘A Firm Hand in the Back.’ The report also explains why, in many cases, it may be impossible to deport a person back to their ‘home country’.
Read a former resident’s account of life at Kærshovedgård here.
Notes on residents with pending cases
Some individuals are housed at Kærshovedgård even though their asylum cases are pending. This can happen, for example, as a result of a conviction for entering the country with a forged passport or another person’s passport. Last year, Denmark’s Supreme Court ruled that it is illegal to convict refugees for this specific offense. However, no residents have been moved out of Kærshovedgård following the ruling.
Other residents have pending cases for reconsiderations or appeals. One resident has been waiting three years for their case to be decided by the European Court of Human Rights. They have procedural residence status and are not subject to deportation, yet they must still live under the strict conditions at the return center.
Finally, individuals are also kept at Kærshovedgård with pending Section 50 cases, meaning the authorities are still assessing whether the deportation order imposed on them is disproportionate in relation to their ties to Denmark, their right to family life, or due to mental health issues. It takes between 6 and 18 months to resolve such cases.
In all these instances, the individuals in question are people for whom it is still unclear whether they will actually have to leave Denmark. Nevertheless, they are required to live under conditions designed to pressure them into doing just that. In 2024, the possibility of obtaining a residence permit due to obstacles to deportation – the former Section 9c, paragraph 2 – was abolished.