Danish Justice Minister Søren Pape Poulsen has admitted that his country has a “big problem” with migrant criminals and has defended new measures from the government designed to make deportations easier.

The minister’s statements come in reaction to a study by Danish media that discovered Somalis were by far the largest foreign nationality in Denmark to be convicted for violence with 916 convictions between 2014 and 2018, Danish tabloid B.T. reports.

“Your data clearly shows that there is a big problem with criminal foreigners that we should not have in our society,” Poulsen said and went on to defend the Danish government’s migration policies saying, “we have tightened the expulsion rules so that we can more easily expel foreigners.”

Poulsen also added that he had recently tabled another bill that will allow judges to order the deportation of migrants who refuse to turn up for their court dates.

Denmark Refuses to Rule Out Deporting Somalis by Force https://t.co/7My46De5k7 — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) February 28, 2019

Peter Kofod of the populist Danish People’s party (DF) also commented on the figures that revealed that Somalians had been convicted of a total of 1,111 crimes in the last five years saying, “It’s pretty wild numbers that B.T. has uncovered. It supports, as we in the Danish People’s Party have pointed out for years, that we in Denmark have a challenge with immigration from a number of countries in Africa and the Middle East.”

“It’s tragic, and we have to respond to that. We must do this by sending people back home and not taking new ones in. It must be the lesson that for too many years, in Denmark and the rest of Western Europe we have had too much from immigration from certain areas,” he added.

Last year Danish migration minister Inger Støjberg addressed Somali migrants in Denmark directly, urging them to return to their country and rebuild saying, “if you no longer need our protection and your life and health are no longer at risk in your home country, and specifically in Somalia, you must of course return home and rebuild the country from which you came from.”

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen also commented on the issue saying that while he would prefer that Somalis left the country voluntarily, he would not rule out forced deportations.