Home Affairs pulls asylum directive as reception offices buckle

The Department of Home Affairs has withdrawn a directive that told refugee reception offices to accept asylum applications no matter how applicants entered the country, after the instruction overwhelmed its offices and drew threats to public order.

As CapeTown ETC reported on 9 October, the directive was issued on 28 September 2026 to give effect to a July Constitutional Court judgment in the case brought by the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town against the Minister of Home Affairs.

The department has yet to publish the details of how it will now implement that judgment. The withdrawal of the directive does not set the judgment aside, and Home Affairs remains bound by it.

That leaves the department working out how to meet a court order that widens access to asylum processing while its reception offices are already unable to handle the volume.

Home Affairs said the directive was an operational measure issued by the director-general’s office without the knowledge of the minister or other political office-bearers, a point reported by EWN.

In explaining the withdrawal, the department said immediate implementation of the ruling produced consequences it described as serious and not foreseeable from the court order, according to The Citizen. It cited overwhelmed refugee reception offices, risks to its officials, and emerging threats to public safety and order.

The withdrawal followed protests over asylum applications that turned violent in Soweto and Durban on Thursday.

The Associated Press reported that at least 24 vehicles were set alight across the two cities and that shops were looted.

Acting national police commissioner Lieutenant-General Puleng Dimpane condemned the violence, saying the right to raise concerns and to protest does not give anyone the right to commit crime.

What the July judgment actually did is narrower than the public argument around it suggests. The court declared certain provisions of the Refugees Act unconstitutional, removing procedural barriers that could stop an asylum seeker’s application being considered because of irregular entry into the country or a missed reporting deadline.

The ruling does not grant refugee status. It does not grant permanent residence. It removes grounds on which an application could be shut out before it was heard.

For an ordinary reader, that distinction is the whole of the legal change. More people can have their claims assessed. Nobody is handed status by the judgment itself.

For anyone who has queued at a refugee reception office, the operational reality is the other half of the story. South Africa’s reception offices have long been the bottleneck in the asylum system, and the department’s own account is that they could not absorb the instruction as written.

Home Affairs said it would begin a fresh process to settle on the most appropriate operational approach to carrying out the court order. No revised arrangements have been announced.

The department is now working to two constraints at once. It must give effect to a judgment it has not appealed and cannot ignore, and it must run a system whose front counters it says are already under strain.

Source: CapeTown ETC, Home Affairs withdraws asylum directive.