Makumbirofa FarmsAdvocacy & Agriculture · Chegutu, Zimbabwe

Breaking Advocacy Report · June 2025

South African Home Affairs in Massive Crisis — Rights & Hopes of Refugees Shattered

Institutional collapse, rampant corruption, and rising xenophobic violence are crushing the most vulnerable.

By Collen Makumbirofa·Journalist, Human Rights Advocate

⚠ Official Warning

“The department can no longer meet its core legal responsibilities, resulting in widespread human rights abuses and weakened national security.”— Kayan Leung, Deputy Director, Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR)

South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs is in the grip of a deep and worsening institutional crisis — one that is not merely administrative, but profoundly human in its consequences. According to Kayan Leung, Deputy Director of Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), the department has reached a breaking point: it can no longer fulfil the basic legal obligations it exists to serve. The result is a cascade of human rights abuses directed at some of the country’s most vulnerable people — refugees, asylum seekers, and even South African citizens themselves.

Both the department’s digital platforms and its physical service points have deteriorated severely. Refugees and asylum seekers attempting to renew permits and maintain legal status are finding the system closed to them — not by law, but by dysfunction. Queues that lead nowhere. Systems that do not respond. Officials who cannot help, will not help, or demand payment to help.

“Asylum seekers and refugees are not failing the system. The system is failing them.”

The Corruption Crisis

Social media across South Africa is saturated with footage and testimonies of police officers accepting bribes from undocumented individuals — a direct consequence of Home Affairs’ dysfunction. When the formal pathways to legal documentation collapse, informal and criminal pathways fill the void. Refugees and asylum seekers whose permits have expired through no fault of their own become targets — vulnerable to extortion by the very officers sworn to protect them.

This is not a peripheral problem. It strikes at the heart of the rule of law, at national security, and at South Africa’s obligations under both its own Constitution and international refugee law. South African citizens are equally being denied identity documents, birth certificates, and civic access — deprived of the documentation that enables participation in public life.

5Mozambicans Killed

1SA Teenager Killed by Mistake

100sImmigrants Displaced

Xenophobic Violence Intensifies

Beyond the walls of Home Affairs offices, a fiercer danger waits in the streets. Foreign nationals — poor, displaced, and unprotected — are facing a surge of xenophobic violence that has turned communities into battlegrounds. In KwaZulu-Natal and Mossel Bay in the Western Cape, shops have been looted and destroyed. Five Mozambican nationals have been killed. In a tragedy that lays bare the senseless brutality of anti-foreigner violence, a 19-year-old Tsonga boy — a South African citizen — was killed after being mistaken for a foreigner.

In Springs, Johannesburg, and in Mossel Bay, hundreds of African immigrants have been displaced. Shacks and homes were looted, burned, and demolished. Families who had built fragile lives from nothing now have nothing again.

⚡ Imminent Threat

June 30 has been declared “D-Day” — a deadline for foreigners to leave South Africa. When marches against immigrants proceed, lives will be lost, businesses looted, and homes burned to the ground.

A Call for Intervention

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), through its South African chapter, must intervene — urgently and decisively — to protect asylum seekers and refugees whose legal lifelines have been severed by Home Affairs’ collapse. Without this intervention, the abuses already documented will escalate into something far worse. UNHCR’s mandate exists precisely for moments like this.

South Africa’s government must also be called to account. President Cyril Ramaphosa, the DA, and every political leader across the spectrum must move beyond condemnation and take concrete, protective action. Law enforcement must end its complicity in bribery and extortion. The xenophobic marches must be stopped before they become massacres.

The poor — foreign and South African alike — are the ones who pay the price when institutions fail and hatred is left unchecked. The wealthy have private services and gated security. The vulnerable have only the state, and right now, the state is failing them completely.

Is there still hope, South Africa?

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