South Africa on Tuesday has appealed to its fellow African governments to cover the full cost of deporting more than 80,000 undocumented migrants from their respective countries, presenting each nation with a bill for the airfare, ground transport, and processing of its citizens currently detained or awaiting removal from South African soil.
According to the South African government, they have spent over $18 million on deporting migrants following the most recent surge of anti-immigration protests and violence. Home Affairs minister Leon Schreiber called the costs “unforeseen” and “unavoidable”, calling upon the national governments of the deportees to cover these costs for them. The costs include transportation, accommodations, and overtime pay for immigration personnel. Formal requests for payment have been sent to Malawi, Ethiopia and Nigeria, among other countries.
Since March, over 178,000 African migrants have either been deported or fled from South Africa amidst a tidal wave of formal and informal persecution. Foreign owned business have been looted, immigrants have been attacked and killed, and anti-immigrant groups have issued an informal deadline of June 30th for immigrants to leave, which has exacerbated this violence. Critics have also decried the South African Police Service (SAPS)’s failure to address the surge in hate crimes targeting migrants, as well as the overuse of raids towards predominantly migrant communities.
Last month South African president Cyril Ramaphosa called for greater cooperation from other African states in tackling the challenges of immigration in an address to the Pan-African Parliament, the legislative body of the African Union. Despite Ramaphosa’s condemnation of anti-immigration violence, and acknowledgment that migrants and other marginalized communities are often used as political scapegoats, his government has nonetheless been criticized by rights groups for its idle position in stifling these protests, which critics say makes them complicit in perpetrating this violence.
In July, President Ramaphosa adopted the five-point plan to address the challenges of undocumented migration. Among these efforts is Operation New Broom, launched in May 2025 by Leon Schreiber, and involves the use mass surveillance technologies to prosecute and deport migrants.
Migrants in South Africa have long faced immense economic precarity, dangerous working conditions, and below-minimum wage jobs which violate existing labour and employment laws. Immigrants have also historically been subject to persecution in South Africa, with xenophobic violence flaring up repeatedly in the past decades. However, South Africa has also served as a continental haven for migrants and refugees fleeing economic and climate uncertainty, as well as violence and state repression.
