Luxembourg-Gare Drug Enforcement Steps Up: 24 Dealers Arrested in Early 2026, Major Checks in January

The Grand Ducal Police's enforcement push in Luxembourg City's Gare-Hollerich district has produced visible results in the first months of 2026. By the end of January, 24 suspected drug dealers had been arrested and presented before an investigating judge, with the majority of those arrests concentrated in the Gare district. Two large-scale checks — on 22 January and 29 January — backed up the routine patrols.

The 22 and 29 January operations

On the afternoon of Thursday 22 January, the police carried out a large-scale check focused on drug-related offences and immigration legislation. On the evening of Thursday 29 January, a similar operation was run, with 20 officers participating. The two checks targeted both the street-level drug trade and the establishments in the area where activity concentrates.

Why Gare-Hollerich

The neighbourhood — anchored by the Luxembourg City train station and surrounding the Place de la Gare — has been the country's most concentrated drug-trade area for over a decade, with associated prostitution and petty-crime activity. Resident and business complaints, repeated municipal-and-state coordination meetings, and successive editions of the National Action Plan against Drug Crimes have all sought to address the situation. The 2025-2026 enforcement push is the most visible of the recent cycles.

The infrastructure response

Three layers complement the enforcement activity. The Gare-Hollerich police station moved to 24/7 operations at the end of 2024. The Luxembourg-Ville central station moved to 24/7 service from 1 May 2026. And patrol allocation across the city has tilted toward the affected areas: between January and April 2025, 35% of Luxembourg City patrols took place in Gare-Hollerich and Bonnevoie, averaging nine patrols per day.

What enforcement does not solve

The drivers of the Gare district's situation are upstream of policing. Open-EU drug-supply patterns, addiction services capacity, social-housing and homelessness allocation, irregular migration flows and the broader European trend toward harder-substance trafficking all sit upstream of the local police's day-to-day work. The structural improvement Luxembourg's residents care about depends on a multi-ministry approach that the Frieden government has signalled but which translates into measurable outcomes only across multi-year horizons.

What to watch through 2026

Three things. Whether arrest volumes through Q2 and Q3 sustain the early-year tempo. Whether the prosecution pipeline produces convictions at a comparable rate, since arrest without follow-through is a closure problem rather than a structural one. And whether the broader package — addiction services, housing, migration coordination — produces the kind of upstream changes that translate into less concentrated drug activity in the Gare neighbourhood within the next 18 months.