German politicians have slammed Mission Lifeline after a tweet from the self-styled migrant ‘rescue’ NGO, which is based in Dresden, appeared to suggest citizens should marry aliens who have no right to live in the country.

Local media reports that Mission Lifeline was accused of encouraging people to take part in sham marriages after the NGO urged unmarried supporters to get together with illegal immigrants who “do not have the right to stay here”.

“You’re not married yet? Maybe you could fall in love with someone who doesn’t have the right to stay here? Could happen, right? Stay open,” reads the controversial social media post, which attracted more than 1,000, mostly critical, responses from the general public.

Amongst the politicians who hit out at Mission Lifeline was interior ministry spokesman for Germany’s Christian Democratic parties, Stephan Mayer, who blasted the social media post as a “highly damning” call to take part in marriage fraud, which he stressed was not a “minor offence” but rather one which was punishable by jail time.

Philipp Amthor, of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), remarked that the NGO had been attempting to sidestep immigration laws as part of a wider open borders agenda.

He told local tabloid, Bild: “’This absurd call for entering marriages shows clearly that these ‘sea rescue’ [NGOs] in fact pursue a much larger agenda.

“They want to thwart our immigration law with their left-wing ideology and lead our constitutional state by the nose.”

But Mission Lifeline spokesman Axel Steier dismissed criticism of the tweet, which he insisted had sought only to raise public awareness “of abstract concepts such as ‘refugee’ and ‘drowned person’”.

In an attack on “untrue and heartless reporting from high circulation media outlets in Austria and Germany”, the NGO claimed that “love” was the focus of the social media post, not marriage, and that Mission Lifeline had intended to use Holocaust Memorial Day to point out that their work ferrying migrants to Europe centred around ‘life and emotions’, according to German news broadcaster n-tv.