Israel is continuing to issue detention orders for other migrants to report to Holot, Tsurkov said.
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Israel began releasing hundreds of African migrants from a remote detention center in southern Israel on Tuesday, after a court ruling earlier this month ordered the release of those held for more than a year.
The judiciary has repeatedly shot down attempts to introduce tougher anti-migrant legislation as Israel tries to cope with an influx of migrants.
Most of those in Israel illegally and who have not been detained live in poor areas of southern Tel Aviv, where there have been several protests over their presence. “Where do I go now?” I don’t know anyone. I don’t have money to rent an apartment. “I don’t know what to do”, Hussein said. But the government plans on rounding up thousands more asylum seekers and sending them to Holot as soon as possible. But critics charge that the government is pursuing a strategy of coercing the migrants to leave Israel willingly.
“The government’s current policy makes things hard on the asylum seekers, but it also hurts the entire Israeli public”, Elisheva Milikowsky of Physicians for Human Rights told Ha’aretz. With only four exceptions, applications for asylum have either languished or been rejected, activists say.
The mayor of the southern Israeli city of Arad has placed municipal policing and inspection vans at entrances to the city in an attempt to prevent the entry of migrants who are being released form the detention facility in Holot. The following year, Israel opened the Holot facility deep in its Negev desert, surrounded by fences and barbed wire.
An Africanmigrant waits for transportation following his release from the Holot Detention Centre in Israel’s Negev desert, on August 25, 2015. The winters are bitter cold, and summer temperatures can soar to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
While the Supreme Court upheld the law, it ruled that migrants held at Holot for more than 12 months must be freed and overturned a provision of a law that would have allowed illegal immigrants to be held for up to 20 months without trial.
“Today we were lucky but it’s not real luck”, said Khalit Ahmad, who was released on Tuesday. “If I could feel safe and secure in Sudan, I would return”, he said.
Tuesday’s release was bittersweet for Faysal Hussein, 28, from Sudan. They are officially barred from working, but many still find jobs in the service industry.
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Many leaving Tuesday said they would go to other, smaller, cities, where they hoped to find work. Instead, they have to find their own way to wherever in Israel they decide to go. Although they complain of discrimination and lack of opportunity, Ethiopian Jews are citizens.
