Durban and Soweto streets emptied as anti-immigration protests spread, police hold hotspots

Residents in the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg have taken their demand for enforcement against undocumented immigration to the streets, shutting parts of those areas earlier this week. The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, known as NATJOINTS, says heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg, and that criminality will not be tolerated. Thirty people have been arrested, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, on offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.

Those are the facts of the week. What they do not explain is why the crowds formed, what the people in them are asking for, or what any of the state’s machinery actually does when a protest closes a city street. That is the part a South African reader needs.

Start with the demand, because that is what put people on the road. The protests were anti-undocumented-immigration protests. The people who marched are asking the state to enforce the country’s immigration law, to deal with people living in South Africa without permission, and to relieve the pressure they say they feel in their own areas. That demand is not new and it is not fringe. It has been building in South African public argument for years, in townships and inner cities where residents say clinics, schools, housing lists and informal trading space are stretched, and where they say the state’s own enforcement has not kept up. Whether every claim made at a march is accurate is a separate question, and it is one this paper tests when the evidence is in front of us. What cannot be disputed is that the anger is real and that it is being expressed in the streets rather than in a queue at Home Affairs.

The scene was not confined to one place. Chaos broke out in the Durban CBD as well as in Soweto and Johannesburg. That spread matters, because it tells you this is not a single local dispute. It is the same argument surfacing in three different urban areas in the same week, which is why the state’s answer has been operational rather than administrative.

That answer is NATJOINTS. The name gets used in briefings without much explanation, so here it is. NATJOINTS is the standing structure that brings the police, the metro police, the intelligence services and other government departments into one coordinated command when a situation cuts across more than one province or more than one agency. It is the reason a deployment in Durban and a deployment in Soweto can be described in the same sentence. What it is not is a court, an immigration authority or a policy maker. It coordinates operations. It does not decide who may stay in the country, who may be removed, or how a Home Affairs backlog gets cleared. Those decisions sit elsewhere, and the absence of any visible movement on them is part of what the marchers are complaining about.

The arrest figures are the state’s own, given at the NATJOINTS briefing. Twenty-five of the 30 arrests were in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng. The offences listed are public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. Those are the counts the state has attached to named individuals, and each of those individuals is entitled to their day in court. The number itself is not the story. The reason people were on the street is the story, and the arrests come after it.

What ordinary South Africans will notice over the coming days is the police presence. Deployments held at hotspots mean more officers, more vehicles and more road closures in parts of Durban and Johannesburg, which affects commuters, traders and residents going about their week. That is the visible cost of a situation that has not been resolved at the level where it started.

As SABC News reported on 10 October 2026, NATJOINTS said criminality would not be tolerated and that heightened deployments would remain in place at the hotspots. That reporting is accurate on what the structure said. What a South African reader should hold alongside it is the question the briefing did not answer. If the protest is about undocumented immigration, what is the state doing about undocumented immigration? Not about the protest. About the thing the protest is about. Deployments contain a crowd. They do not process an application, clear a queue, run a removal or fix an enforcement system that residents say has not delivered.

That gap is where this argument will continue, whatever happens to the 30 people in the dock. The people who marched have made their demand in the only way that reliably gets attention. The state has answered with a policing operation. Until there is movement on the underlying question, the streets are likely to keep asking.

The Enquirer will keep reporting on what the state can actually enforce, who may remain, who may be removed, and what residents in Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg are demanding, with the record in front of us rather than the press release.