BMA: 27k people deported during festive season
The Border Management Authority says some 27,000 people were deported for trying to enter South Africa illegally during the recent festive period.
This included people with invalid passports, fraudulent visas, and those who were undesirable or inadmissible.
The Border Management Authority briefed the media on the 2023 festive season border operations on Sunday.
The BMA commissioner, Mike Masiapato, said undesirable individuals are people who committed crimes in other countries and appear on the Interpol red list.
Inadmissible individuals are people with invalid passports and those who failed to produce yellow fever certificates while travelling from yellow fever-endemic countries.
"In the 43 days of this festive period, when you add the numbers of the people intercepted for not having documentation, which is 15,924, and the number of undesirable people, which 6,455 and those that were inadmissible, which is 4,626, you get a total of 27 005 individuals who were fairly deported while attempting to enter South Africa illegally from the 6th December 2023 to the 18th of January 2024," said Mike Masiapato.
"During this 43-day period, we observed an increased detection rate on the undesirables, and this is due to the increased utilisation of the Biometric Movement Control System after the Department of Home Affairs assisted us in increasing the rollouts of this particular system across the various ports of entry.”
These individuals have been banned from entering South Africa for five years.
Masiapato said the BMA assisted some five million travellers at the country's ports of entry during the festive period.
"This number represents an increase of over one million travellers compared to the 2022/3 number of four million travellers. However, this number is still one million less than the pre-Covid average numbers of around 6 million travellers.”
OR Tambo International Airport recorded an increase of 22% in travellers volumes compared to the previous year.
A majority of illegal foreign nationals who tried to enter South Africa illegally were intercepted at the Lebombo border with Mozambique and Beitbridge between South Africa and Zimbabwe.
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