South Africa’s asylum backlog now stands at 161,000 appeals, and last week’s unrest in Durban and Soweto showed what that operational failure costs. A procedural Constitutional Court judgment on how asylum applications may be lodged triggered violent protests, fuelled by a disinformation campaign run by March and March and others, who falsely claimed that a Home Affairs directive granted asylum seekers residency, citizenship or voting rights. Beneath the noise lies an institution whose operational choices, backlog economics and disregard for court rulings have produced a system that is expensive, unreliable and now politically volatile.
The legal dispute began in February 2026, when the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town and Lawyers for Human Rights took the Department of Home Affairs to court over procedural impediments to asylum applicants. The amendment to the Refugee Act, in operation since 2020, requires asylum seekers arriving at a designated port of entry to obtain a transit visa to travel to one of the country’s five Refugee Reception Offices in Musina, Pretoria, Durban, Gqeberha and Cape Town. That visa allows five days to reach an office and lodge an application.
The department’s implementation of these rules since 2024 has effectively disqualified four categories of people from even lodging an asylum application: those without a transit visa, those with a visa who failed to reach an office within five days, those without another valid visa, and those who entered the country outside a designated port of entry. The throughput figures tell their own story. Between April 2022 and March 2024, the department issued just 91 asylum transit visas, a number that suggests immigration officials rarely hand them out. The 2021 case of 22 Afghan nationals denied entry at the border illustrates the wider pattern: undocumented asylum seekers are more likely to be turned away.
In July, the court ruled that blocking applications on procedural grounds was invalid, because doing so amounts to possible refoulement, the forcible return of an asylum seeker to a country where they face a clear risk of persecution, torture, violence or other serious harm. The court also found the department’s “good cause” interviews, used to test whether applicants had valid reasons for lacking a transit visa, to be invalid, noting that the Act and regulations “have no guidance whatsoever, creating a real risk of arbitrary and inconsistent decision-making”. Refugee bodies report that virtually no one passed these interviews, with little clarity on the criteria. The judgment is narrow: procedural issues may inform the merits of a claim, since they bear on credibility, but they cannot be used to prevent an application from being heard at all.
To comply with the court’s 60-day deadline, the department issued a directive on 28 September 2026 requiring all reception offices, with immediate effect, to receive every person who reports in person and indicates an intention to apply for asylum, and to discontinue “good cause” interviews and procedural rejections. Gqeberha reopened first on 2 October, with the other offices following during the week. Queues formed, and in Durban and Pretoria there was intimidation of asylum seekers and department staff, including violent demonstrations outside the Durban office where protesters demanded the government stop accepting applications.
On Friday, the department withdrew the directive, citing “national interest, security considerations and the impracticality in terms of its operationalisation”. The department must still find a way to implement the judgment, but for now the status quo prevails and the offices are closed to newcomers again.
Several pieces of context are missing from the uproar. The department says its offices were “overwhelmed”, language that feeds the notion of an inundation of undocumented asylum seekers, but the numbers do not support that framing. South Africa hosts about 167,000 refugees and asylum seekers, against roughly 2.4 million international migrants, two populations governed by different legal regimes: refugee law and asylum permits via reception offices, versus immigration law and visas via VFS offices. Reports indicate the queues ran to hundreds, not thousands, and refugee legal representatives say those not seen at Gqeberha and Cape Town were given future appointments.
The deeper operational record is more damning. Reception offices have been closed to new applications for long stretches: nationwide during Covid from March 2020 to May 2022, and unlawfully in Cape Town from 2012 to 2023 and Gqeberha from 2011 to 2018, despite court rulings ordering them open, including scathing judgments and costs orders against a former minister. Meanwhile the department boasts a 95% to 100% rejection rate for asylum claims, which has produced the backlog of 161,000 appeals. People with valid claims have simply been unable to apply for extended periods, and when they can, rejection is highly likely.
Security failures compounded the operational ones. Although police were present at all offices, intimidation by March and March and other groups occurred only in Durban and Pretoria, not at Musina, Cape Town or Gqeberha, yet the directive was withdrawn in its entirety. The department apparently did not coordinate with the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Migration or refugee groups before releasing the directive, and some experts suggest an online-only system, as used during Covid, should have been considered until tensions cool. Journalists and NGO staff have also faced threats and doxxing this week.
A relatively simple procedural matter has escalated into violence, disinformation and a retreat from a court order. The attacks on the Constitutional Court reflect a broader pattern of the South African constitutional project under attack, but the operational dysfunction, the closed offices, the 91 visas, the 161,000 appeals, is a mess of Home Affairs’ own making. For further reading, see https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-10-11-south-africas-asylum-crisis-is-a-mess-of-home-affairs-own-making/