Asylum Seekers Face Shut Doors Again as SA Reverses Order

The brief window in which South Africa’s Refugee Reception Offices were accepting new asylum-seeker applications has closed again. On Friday, the Department of Home Affairs withdrew a directive that had ordered those offices to begin taking in applications, saying conditions on the ground quickly became unmanageable.

The directive, issued on 28 September 2026 to all Refugee Reception Offices, had instructed staff to receive asylum-seeker applications. The department described it as a purely operational measure, designed to carry out the Constitutional Court’s order of 7 July in the Scalabrini of Cape Town matter. Within days of it taking effect, the offices at the centre of the country’s asylum system were overwhelmed. Officials working in them were placed at risk, and the department says serious threats to public safety and order emerged.

For the people who depend on those offices, the reversal means the door has shut once more, pending a new approach. The department has not yet said what that approach will look like, only that it will now develop one.

In its Friday statement, the department moved to distance the directive from any political hand. It said the document was prepared without the knowledge or consultation of the Minister of Home Affairs or any other political office bearer. Claims that the withdrawal, or the original directive, was politically motivated are categorically untrue, the department argued, pointing out that the directive stemmed from a Constitutional Court case the department itself had opposed.

That point matters to how the episode is understood. The department had fought the litigation, lost, and then issued instructions to its offices to comply. The withdrawal, it insists, is not defiance but a response to consequences that, in its words, could not have been foreseen in the court order.

The human toll of the immediate implementation was described in stark terms. Reception offices, which handle the paperwork that determines whether people can regularise their status, were swamped within days. The department said its officials faced risks in carrying out the work, and that the surge generated threats to public safety and order around the offices themselves. It did not detail specific incidents, but the language of its statement made clear that the situation on the ground had deteriorated faster than anyone anticipated.

Meanwhile, the department said it would embark on a fresh process to determine the most appropriate operational approach, one that allows it to comply with the Constitutional Court’s order without overwhelming the offices and the people who work in and rely on them.

At the same time, it sought to reassure the court and the public about its intentions. “The department reaffirms its respect for the judiciary and the rule of law, as well as its commitment to determining an operationally appropriate and sustainable method of complying with the order,” the statement said.

The tension at the heart of the matter is familiar to anyone who has followed the asylum system: a court has ruled, the department must comply, but the machinery built to receive applicants cannot absorb the demand that compliance immediately unleashes. The department’s answer, for now, is to pause and redesign rather than push through.

What remains unresolved is the question facing asylum seekers themselves: when they will be able to lodge applications again, and under what conditions. The department’s fresh process is meant to answer that, though no timeline was given in the statement.

Further background on the withdrawal and the department’s full statement can be found at https://www.eurasiareview.com/11102026-south-africa-home-affairs-withdraws-directive-on-intake-of-asylum-seeker-applications/

For now, the department’s position is that compliance with the court will come, but on terms it says must be operationally sustainable for the offices, the officials who staff them, and the public order around them.