An employee of a German immigration office and her husband have been arrested for allegedly assisting a human smuggling ring which brought Indian men into the country through sham marriages in exchange for hefty payments, Bild has reported.

The Cologne branch of the immigration office told the tabloid on Thursday that it has revoked the residence permits illegally issued by the criminal group, which involved two other people.

According to Bild, the smuggling ring exploited the EU’s family reunification program to bring in the Indians.

The foreign nationals arrived in Cyprus, where they entered fictitious marriages with Bulgarian women whom they had never met before, it said.

A member of the Cologne immigration office, identified as Subha L., then processed and approved the applications for residence permits by the Indian males despite the irregularities in their paperwork, the report read.

The employee and her husband earned at least €76,000 (around $85,000) from the scheme, Bild said.

A lawyer for one of the suspected smugglers told the WDR broadcaster that the scheme had allowed more than 20 Indian men to enter the EU.

Subha L. was arrested along with her husband in December 2025 and remains in per-trial detention. She has been dismissed from her job, the Cologne immigration office said. The trial for the four suspected members of the criminal group is scheduled to begin in February.

The immigration office said it tightened workflow controls following the scandal to ensure any suspicious cases are identified more promptly.

An MP for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party accused the Cologne immigration office of failing to execute its duties and called for it to be audited by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

“We are witnessing a growing loss of control within an agency that views itself as a ‘welcoming authority’ rather than an immigration authority,” Seif told the Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper.

In 2023, another employee of the Cologne immigration office was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for falsifying the documents of Syrian refugees applying for residence permits.

Illegal immigration has again become a contentious topic in the EU this year after more than 72,000 migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta in late July. Up to 8,000 foreigners still remain scattered throughout the territory, straining local resources and prompting protests by residents.

Despite the number of arrivals subsiding since the EU migrant crisis of 2015, the foreign-born population in the bloc reached a record 64.2 million last year, expanding by 20.2 million since 2010, according to a report published by the Center for Research and Analysis on Migration at RFBerlin in April.

Germany continues to have the largest number of immigrants in the EU, with 18 million foreign-born citizens, making up 21.2% of the country’s population, the paper said.