A foreign national in a guarded centre — what the family can do, and how fast

If you are reading this for someone close to you, hours matter, not days. Placement in a guarded centre is ordered by a district court on the Border Guard’s application, and the time to appeal that order is short. In parallel there is usually a return procedure running with its own seven-day deadline — and both cases have to be run at once. Write to us with the detained person’s details and we will tell you what to do first.

Who decides and for how long

The Border Guard may detain a foreign national, but placement in a guarded centre is ordered by a district court. The order sets a period, which is then often extended by further orders — and each of them can be challenged separately. That matters, because many families give up after the first order, treating the matter as closed.

Detention is meant to be a last resort. The court should consider lighter measures: reporting to the authority, a surety, residing at a designated address, surrender of the travel document. If it did not, or did so formally in a single sentence, that is a concrete ground of appeal.

When placement in a centre is not permitted

The law expressly excludes detention in some situations — above all where it could endanger life or health, and where the person’s physical and mental condition supports a presumption that they were a victim of violence. Cases involving minors and people with disabilities call for particular care.

These are circumstances the court often simply does not know, because nobody put them before it. Medical records, certificates and family statements can change the outcome — but someone has to file them, and the detained person usually cannot.

What the family can do straight away

Before a lawyer is even involved, four things are worth doing immediately:

• establish which centre the person is in and which Border Guard unit is handling the case — nothing can be filed without this,
• gather identity documents, proof of residence, medical records and the marriage or birth certificate,
• note the date of detention and the date the order was served — every deadline runs from these,
• do not rely on the detained person managing it: access to a phone and to documents is limited, and the clock is running.

Detention is not the end of the residence case

Placement in a centre does not settle that the person must leave. A return procedure runs in parallel, and sometimes also an application for international protection or for a stay on humanitarian grounds. Each has its own deadlines and its own appeal route.

The commonest mistake is running only one of them. An appeal against detention without an appeal against the return decision leaves the way open for that decision to be enforced — and conversely, a successful appeal does not by itself get anyone out of the centre.

The appeal deadline runs regardless

If a return decision was issued in parallel, its seven-day deadline does not pause because someone is in a centre. We describe the procedure and its traps in our piece on an order to leave Poland and appealing a return decision. In practice this is the deadline most often lost, because the family’s whole attention goes to the detention.

How we work on such cases

We establish where the person is being held and the state of both procedures, enter the case under a power of attorney, appeal the placement order and run the return case in parallel. We keep in touch with the family, in eight languages, because they are usually the ones on the other end of the phone. See the scope of our work for foreign nationals.

In detention cases, do not wait for the end of the working day. Write or call — assessment and a plan of action from PLN 500. Give us the name and the date of detention; we will establish the rest ourselves.