Authorities on Tuesday began the release of 1,200 African migrants from detention centers in the South, two weeks after a High Court of Justice decision on Israel’s disputed “anti-infiltration law”. “Where do I go now?” I have no money.
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After the release, Holot, located in a remote part of the Negev Desert near Gaza, will still have 587 African asylum seekers, all prisoners for less than a year. Israel says they are merely economic migrants in search of work whose swelling numbers threaten the country’s Jewish character.
The migrants, most asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan, will receive a temporary residence permit when they leave the Holot detention center, which will prevent them from entering the two cities, where the majority of illegal migrants from Africa now live.
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.
Israel has appealed to third countries, saying it can not grant formal asylum seeker status to the 45,000 illegal migrants in the tiny country.
Tuesday’s release was bittersweet for Faysal Hussein, 28, from Sudan.
Fissel Sidig Adam, a 28-year-old from the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur, said he was leaving with “64 shekels [$17] and a sandwich”.
Today, 750 people were released in small groups with the rest to be freed on Wednesday, said Sivan Weizman, a prison service spokeswoman. “We were stuck in Holot (detention centre) for 18-20 months, the state tells you at first that “you will go to a shelter where it will be decided whether you are a refugee or not”, and then after 18 months we’re told “that’s it, go away from here”.
Asylum seekers who worked, albeit illegally, in Eilat or Tel Aviv won’t be able to return to their jobs – even though some have been asked to by their former employers – and those who families there will be kept from them.
The judiciary has repeatedly shot down attempts to introduce tougher anti-migrant legislation as Israel tries to cope with an influx of migrants.
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A recent UN report detailed how Eritrea, under Isaias Afwerki’s iron-fisted regime for the past 22 years, has created a repressive system in which people are routinely arrested on a whim, detained, tortured, killed or disappeared.
