Durban refugees told to leave by 30 September as shelters close

Refugees in Durban who were forced out of a makeshift camp say they have nowhere safe to return to, and the deadline they are counting down to is 30 September.

As Al Jazeera English reported on 28 September, the fear among those people is that the deadline will bring a fresh round of attacks on them.

That is the whole of what the outlet published. It is accurate as far as it goes. What it does not carry is the part a South African reader needs: who is inside that camp, which state department owns the deadline, and what the law actually says about the people who are being moved.

What the deadline is, and who set it

The 30 September date is a state deadline, not a community one. Deadlines of this kind in South Africa are ordinarily set by the Department of Home Affairs, sometimes working with a municipality and the South African Police Service. The department has not been quoted in the Al Jazeera report, and it has not said publicly, in the material available to this paper, what will happen to the people still in Durban when the date passes.

That is the first gap. A deadline without a stated plan for the people it applies to is not a policy. It is a date.

The camp, and why it existed

Makeshift camps of this kind are not a Durban invention. They appear when people who have fled their home countries cannot access formal shelter, cannot regularise their status, and cannot work lawfully. The people in them are a mix: asylum seekers waiting on permits, refugees with status already granted, and people whose documentation has lapsed or was never issued.

Under South African law, no group, movement or individual may enforce immigration law. That authority belongs to the state, and to the Department of Home Affairs and the police specifically. A self-declared deadline has no standing in law. A blockade that denies a person access to a clinic, a grant office or a place to sleep is a crime, not a protest tactic.

What South African readers should watch

Three things matter in the days after 30 September.

First, whether Home Affairs publishes a plan for the people affected, with named shelters, transport and a route to documentation. A deadline without those is not enforceable in any humane sense.

Second, whether the South African Police Service maintains a visible presence around the camp and the areas people are being moved to. Under our law the police are responsible for preventing public violence, and where they do that job well, it should be said so plainly.

Third, whether any prosecutions follow if violence does occur. The National Prosecuting Authority has a record of bringing charges in cases of public violence and intimidation, and that record is the measure that matters, not the rhetoric.

What is missing from the foreign report

The Al Jazeera piece frames the story as fear of new attacks. That fear is real and it is being expressed by the people concerned. What the report leaves out is the institutional picture: which department owns the deadline, what the state has said it will do, and what legal protections exist for people who are in the country lawfully.

Those omissions are not a correction. They are context. A reader in Doha or London reading that headline has no way of knowing that the 30 September date is a South African administrative decision, not a foreign one, and that the people most able to change what happens next sit in Pretoria, not in the camp.

The Enquirer has asked the Department of Home Affairs for comment on the deadline and on what provision has been made for the people affected. We will report the response when it comes.

Source: Al Jazeera English, “Refugees in South Africa fear new attacks as September 30 deadline looms”, published 28 September 2026.