BERLIN (AP) — A bus carrying 31 Syrian refugees arrived from southern Germany in Berlin on Thursday night as a district councilor in Bavaria followed up on his pledge to Chancellor Angela Merkel that he’d send refugees her way if his district could no longer provide accommodation for them.

The act comes amid ongoing concerns about how Germany will deal with the 1.1 million asylum-seekers that flooded in a year ago.

“It’s time we set a limit”, the local citizens had told him, according to Yahoo News.

“None of us can exactly predict economic developments”, she said, adding there were unknowns about the costs of integrating migrants and fighting the causes of the influx of refugees.

Germany could take in more than the 200,000 refugees proposed by Seehofer as a cap for this year, but the quota should be significantly below last year’s number, he said.

The coach left Landshut early on Thursday and arrived at 5pm outside the Chancellery, to be greeted by media crews but no government representatives. Dreier, who had travelled to Berlin separately by vehicle, said he had agreed to personally pay for the refugees’ first night in a Berlin hotel, stressing that the bus had also been paid for by “a private person”, not with taxpayers money. More than one million migrants have entered the country in the previous year alone.

Pro-refugee activists condemned the trip as a publicity stunt that exploited the refugees.

“This is a stunt that misuses the plight of refugees to send the message “We want to close the borders”.

Dreier, who was not available to comment, represents the Freie Waehler, a loose grouping of politicians who do not have a common policy, but campaign on individual issues mostly at the local level.

The Chancellor is under increasing pressure to stem the flow of migrants coming to Germany as several thousand continue to stream in every day and there has been a backlash by right-wing groups.

However the voices have become louder following the incident at Cologne on New Year’s eve, where over six hundred woman were sexually assaulted by Arab and African migrants.

Bavaria, a conservative state that borders Austria to the south, is the home of Mr Seehofer’s Christian Social Union (CSU) – sister party to Ms Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – and is the main entry point for migrants and refugees.

Ms Merkel has resisted such a cap, arguing it would be impossible to enforce.