A journalist from Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung has been suspended after she attempted to prevent the deportation of a Chechen family and attacked a police officer by biting them in the leg.

The journalist, 51-year-old Ines Scholz has been suspended from her job after claims that she attacked a police officer during an attempt at deporting a family of Chechen migrants to Poland. She is said to be the spouse of the grandfather of the children who also lived in the apartment Austrian newspaper Heute reports.

The Chechen family set to be deported, a 34-year-old, a 38-year-old and their six children, had been living in the Austrian capital of Vienna since Autumn of 2016. Police raided the apartment in which they all lived in order to deport them back to Poland under the European Union’s Dublin Regulations.

Ms Scholz released a statement through the pro-migrant group “Asylum in Need” saying the police would not let her into the apartment initially and so she told them she was a journalist. She said she put her head in-between the door frame and held the officer by the leg and said police were spreading “false rumours” that she bit the officer.

Both Scholz and her partner, Chechen-born refugee Vaha Banjaev, are facing charges of resisting state authority as a result of the incident.

The deportation of failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants has been a contentious issue in Austria and other countries across Europe. Some have argued against sending migrants to other European countries like Hungary because their treatment of migrants does not meet certain standards.

Many left-wing groups claim that certain nationalities cannot be deported back to their homelands because they do not deem them as safe countries even if the government recognises them as such.

Chechen migrants have become a focus recently due to alleged abuses of homosexuals in Chechnya by the government led by President Razman Kadyrov. Some have said that Kadyrov’s government has put homosexuals in concentration camps and when confronted on the issue Kadyrov told a journalist, “We don’t have those kinds of people here. We don’t have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada.”

In Germany, the controversy has mostly revolved around asylum seekers from Afghanistan after German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her government announced they would be seeking to increase the number of deportations late last year.

Despite opposition from many left-wing regional governments, many of which have refused to cooperate with the German federal government, the people of Germany overwhelmingly support the deportation of illegal migrants and failed asylum seekers.