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South Africa: Asylum Seekers Frustrated With Foreshore's Home Affairs

Source: GroundUp (Cape Town), 18/01/2016

Last year GroundUp reported the poor service offered to asylum seekers
and refugees by the Department of Home Affairs' foreshore offices. We
revisited the offices today. The situation remains unchanged.

On 18 December we reported:
The Department of Home Affairs' foreshore office has been accused of
turning away refugees since September 2015 without assisting them
because the department has lost their files. Some refugees have
consequently lost their jobs and had their bank accounts frozen. While
in the queue outside Home Affairs, pregnant women and children stand
in the scorching sun daily waiting for officials to call out their
names.

This morning, refugees lining up, mainly to renew their asylum status,
complained that the service continues to be poor.

There were hundreds of people standing in the queue outside the
offices. At about 7:30am a Home Affairs official together with a
security guard leaned over a wall and began collecting forms from the
people queuing below (see photo).

One man from Somalia was slightly optimistic, "I have noted a slight
improvement in the services today. They have collected everyone's
document. Most of the days when I come here they collect a few of
these documents and disappear till late," he said.

A woman from Kenya standing with her children said, "I have been
coming to this office since last Tuesday but am not yet attended to.
Today they have collected our documents but we still have to wait and
see if they will come back to us in time. Most of the time they
collect our documents and come back around 2pm, only to tell us to
come the following day."

A woman from DRC who was breastfeeding one of her twin children said
she was afraid she and her friend might lose their jobs because they
have spent too much time at Home Affairs trying to get their documents
in order. "I am here together with my husband and a friend of ours.
Our documents waiting for refugee status have been collected by the
official but we are not sure when we will be called. Right now my
friend is frustrated," she said.

She added that officials do not usually work on documents collected
that day. "I realised that people attended to on a particular day
might have been visiting the offices for the past two weeks or so. I
am sure they have a backlog."

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