With doors being smashed and roads closed-off during migrant raids, Beth Cachia of JRS Malta told The Malta Independent on Sunday that such aggressive immigration control is being made a "public spectacle" with the intention to drill the public into believing that refugees are criminals. 

Cachia stressed that as things stand, "the government is making a public spectacle out of immigration control. Like a garage door being smashed down, and the photos being all over the media. Or closing off a street in Hamrun so that everybody gets curious and comes out to look."

She illustrated her argument by highlighting that this is even the case when people are in detention and are taken out in handcuffs even if they have an appointment at Mater Dei. "It's all a psychological tactic to tell the public that refugees are criminals."

JRS, the Jesuit Refugee Service, is an international organisation working in 57 countries with refugees and forcibly displaced persons. JRS Malta, active on the island since the late 1990s, works with asylum seekers, refugees as well as rejected asylum seekers and undocumented people, offering legal support, psychosocial services, alongside outreach in the local community, awareness-raising and advocacy. 

"Malta has been called out many times for their detention practices, including by the European Court of Human Rights," she said. There are persons who have been kept in detention for 22 months, when the limit is 18. "But it still happened, it still happens, it will continue to happen. Sadly, this person now remains undocumented in Malta even after he was released from detention because he could not be returned. There have been so many cases that focus not only on detention conditions, but also on the illegality of detention."

She also highlighted that when it comes to detention, access for NGOs has deteriorated significantly over the years. "We no longer have access to the living spaces to see their conditions and only our lawyers can visit, and then only to see a maximum of six people at once."

With such stringent new regulations, Cachia raised concerns. "How do you prioritise these six people in such a small pocket of time? Are there people in detention who are not even able to come to the phone and ask for someone to visit them?" Bottom line, she said, "I think this kind of climate and culture of people being 'stuck' is very common. And the government's solution to dealing with this is to push for return, but not everyone can go back."

When asked point blank about the real economic burden of asylum-seeking refugees, Cachia said that very few refugees are being accepted into Maltese territory. "The people who are actually released from detention and are then allowed to work, pay National Insurance, are entitled to a work permit and pay taxes so if anything, they're putting in to the economy rather than taking. And we're still talking about a really small number of people."

Cachia spoke about the impact of the removal of the SRA policy on the people JRS Malta works with. Back in 2020, Identita', then Identity Malta Agency, announced updates to the Specific Residence Authorisation (SRA) Policy (launched in 2018), to replace the Temporary Humanitarian Protection - New (THPN) status, which gave regular status to rejected asylum seekers living and working in Malta for a number of years, provided that they had not been convicted of a serious crime and have a stable employment.

The 2020 updates affirmed that new applications would no longer be accepted, which left many people stuck once again in legal limbo.  But in 2023, through a Malta Independent on Sunday interview with aditus director Neil Falzon, it was revealed that approximately 1,000 rejected asylum seekers were stuck in an effective legal limbo after the scheme that enabled them to obtain an identity card for a minimum of two years had been abruptly stopped, leaving them stuck in a vacuum. Falzon had said that the revocation of this scheme meant that rejected asylum seekers live outside the law and are rarely entitled to its protection and unable to plan for the future.

Coming to 2024, Cachia said that this issue of the removal of SRA has greatly impacted the people that JRS Malta works with. "Because it is strongly rooted in rejected asylum seekers being employed and contributing to the economy, many people lost the status because they had to stop working due to health conditions. We know that in Malta, migrant labour often is in the construction industry or other forms of manual labour, that these people were no longer able to do. So, we've had people who were told by doctors that they can't work in construction or manual labour leading them to lose their jobs and unable to find another one. As a result, they lost their SRA status and became rejected asylum seekers, without access to healthcare, and it's all just a vicious cycle. Their initial health issue would be further stressed and exacerbated now, without access to healthcare."

She added that "the SRA status wasn't perfect, but it was recognition that people had been contributing to Maltese society, so we celebrated that when it was introduced. When it was taken away, people's rights slowly deteriorated."

Cachia said that since the cessation of the SRA status, people who lost the status end up with the 'yellow book', a document issued by the Immigration Police which allows people access to the labour market, but can be taken away at any time.

On the topic of return, Beth said that "for Malta to return people, it must have a bilateral agreement with the country of origin, and the reality is that Malta never had very many of these and this was not a message that was being given very often to the public."

Cachia said that when Malta wants to return people, they are first put into detention, where they remain until the legal limit of 18 months lapses, sometimes even exceeding this time frame. "If you're issued with a removal order, you can be in detention for a maximum of 18 months," she said.

Cachia said that after detention, these people originally destined to be returned would be released, and become undocumented migrants. "This doesn't make sense for the country. These are people with skills, they're working, they're often people who come from countries designated as 'safe countries of origin', like Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, they often speak our languages (Maltese and English) and are willing to contribute to Maltese society." To make matters worse, apart from issues with documentation, "you have this culture of return as a priority, with raids on people's communities; shops being closed, people's livelihoods being taken from them. I would say the system is very rigged against them and it causes a lot of fear."

With regards to the aggressive measures like raids and crackdowns, Cachia said, "They [the government] want to show that Malta is tough on irregular immigration." She went on to point out, "They don't highlight that these are people who who've been here a long time, have been working, they're well set up. But the authorities leave this out of the message."

In the case that a bilateral agreement is made with a country, Cachia said that they target areas where it's known that a lot of migrants live, such as Hamrun, Marsa, Bugibba. "They go around checking documents and if you don't have your document on you or it's a yellow book showing you've been rejected twice, it's highly likely that you can also be issued with a removal order and taken to detention. We're seeing a lot more of this even going as far as roadside checks, that's the climate that we're now living in."