Force and Fiat| The refugee crisis of the state’s own making

If you passed by the General Administration for Passports, Immigration, and Nationality in Abbasiya during the first months of 2026, a period that saw an unprecedented escalation against refugees in Egypt, you would have seen a long line of dark-skinned people, among them women and children, surrounded by security guards, some of them shackled to one another.

At first glance, the scene does not look like part of routine administrative procedure. This is an exceptional situation: groups of Sudanese migrants and asylum seekers held at the department responsible for immigration and nationality files, in preparation for their deportation to a country still at war, with no regard for the conditions or dangers awaiting those sent back.

Between arriving in Egypt and being forcibly returned to a Sudan torn apart by war, tens of thousands of migrants fall into a crisis manufactured for them by the Egyptian authorities—one that blocks their path to legal residency and prevents them from regularizing their presence in the country. They find themselves hunted, detained, and sent back again.

The executive regulations of the asylum law took effect on Friday, Aug. 21. But that does not mean the new asylum system has actually begun operating. The elements of the legislative and regulatory framework needed to apply the law remain incomplete or undisclosed. No clear transitional arrangements have been revealed for managing the handover of authority or organizing the status of refugees and asylum seekers. No announced change has occurred, so far, in registration rules or procedures, while the institutional framework tasked with implementing the law remains unfinished.

No safe passage but the desert

When armed conflict broke out in Sudan in April 2023 and hundreds of thousands fled to neighboring countries, Egypt chief among them, the Egyptian authorities responded not by opening safe routes and genuine access to registration and asylum procedures, but by tightening entry requirements, eventually requiring Sudanese nationals, broad categories of whom are normally exempt from visa requirements, to obtain visas in advance. This effectively canceled the freedom-of-movement arrangements under the Four Freedoms Agreement between the two countries.

Obtaining an advance visa is, of course, beyond the reach of most people fleeing the country. Neither the war nor their economic circumstances allow for it. According to testimonies and human rights reports, the visa process runs through opaque channels and intermediaries, and it comes with steep costs most people cannot afford. The path to protection becomes a selective one, and many are pushed to cross the border irregularly, in the absence of safe, accessible alternatives.

Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have documented survivors’ accounts of deaths and serious injuries during desert crossings into the country, whether from vehicle rollovers, breakdowns, or people being abandoned in remote areas without water or food.

One such testimony, documented by the Refugees Platform in Egypt, came from Mohammed Abdel Majid(*): the vehicle he was traveling in overturned during his escape from the war, and he was detained and deported despite his serious injuries.

“I was injured, and my mother died after the car we were in to get into Egypt flipped over. I was surprised to find myself in the hospital shackled and under guard. Before my treatment was even finished, I learned from the officers that they were going to deport all of us, and that my mother would be buried in Aswan.”

That is how Mohammed’s escape ended. It is not a side effect of visa policy. It is a predictable outcome of mass displacement and ongoing war on one hand, and the closure of every legal route on the other.

A trap in every step

But surviving the desert is not the end of the danger. Even those among the thousands who make it through are given no chance to catch their breath or sort out their status; they are arrested and detained the moment they reach the border governorates.

An investigation I took part in with The New Humanitarian, published in April 2024 and based on satellite imagery, field testimony, documents, and cross-checked visual evidence, revealed immediate returns to Sudan involving women and children, following their detention in border areas and military sites used in practice as places of confinement.

Many of them were never given the chance to file an asylum claim or receive an individual risk assessment before being sent back. Amnesty International has also documented the mass detention and forced return of Sudanese nationals without due process or genuine access to UNHCR.

The targeting is not confined to border regions. It extends to cities and to the roads leading to Cairo, where UNHCR registration procedures are, in practice, concentrated. Even those who manage to evade arrest at the border and enter the country face a new danger once they travel to the capital to register or seek legal aid, especially given the absence of a registration office in Aswan that could process the status of new arrivals right after they cross.

In the effort to reach a registration appointment or obtain legal services, bus and train stations and security checkpoints along the road become new points of danger, traps for catching migrants and drawing up police reports against them. These reports rely on recurring language and vague phrasing, previously documented by the Refugees Platform in Egypt. Security operations are typically justified as acting on “ministry instructions” and information from a “confidential source,” and they end with groups of refugees being arrested and split between charges of “migrant smuggling” and “irregular migration.”

The police reports are based on the Law on the Entry, Residence, and Exit of Foreigners No. 89 of 1960, and the Law on Combating Illegal Migration and Migrant Smuggling No. 82 of 2016.

These reports do not always follow the usual path, and they do not end in an individual criminal investigation or a specific finding of responsibility. Instead, they end with those detained being referred to “the competent administrative authority, as it sees fit.”

From there, deportation proceedings begin through land border crossings, a long journey in which people are moved between police stations and then to border crossings. One lawyer who provides support to refugees and migrants in southern Egypt, in testimony recorded by the Refugees Platform in Egypt, compared these scenes to theater: “You already know what decision will be made in advance, because the police reports are just a formality to criminalize people’s presence in the country, despite the apparent legal violation.”

Homegrown crisis

These practices reveal, with striking clarity, the approach Egyptian authorities take: placing refugees at the heart of a crisis of the authorities' own making, then using that same crisis to abuse and deport them.

The crisis begins by restricting access to visas, registration, or residency renewal. That does not just create a fragile legal status; it produces an administrative “violation” later used to justify that a person deserves detention and removal. In other words: the paths to regular status are closed off and complicated, and then whoever cannot navigate them is punished for it.

The Refugees Platform in Egypt calls this phenomenon “forced undocumentation.” It is not limited to new arrivals; it extends to people who have lived in the country for years, people registered with UNHCR, and others waiting on appointments to obtain or renew residency permits that can take months, while their residency status remains valid for only a limited time.

In this sense, thousands enter a state of “irregularity” they did not choose, one that state agencies use to label them as present in the country unlawfully, without the administration (in this case, the interior ministry) ever accounting for the obstacles it helped create, and without treating those obstacles as grounds for leniency rather than punishment. A person holding a registration appointment, a UNHCR document, or proof of a residency renewal request should not be treated as though they concealed their status or evaded the law.

This is true even though the status of those registered is, in fact, “legal,” and they are entitled to protection under the Egyptian Constitution, even if they find themselves in a state of “undocumented or irregular arrival or presence.”

The Hell of forced return

In August 2023, the Prime Minister issued Decree No. 3326, granting foreigners residing irregularly a three-month grace period to regularize their status, in some cases by depositing $1,000 (or its equivalent) and providing an Egyptian sponsor.

Even though the decree was later extended, and officials clarified that it did not apply to refugees and asylum seekers, it was used in media discourse as a tool and a narrative to criminalize refugees, portraying them as people who “failed to regularize their status,” with no mention of the barriers to registration, residency, and protection, or of the fact that it did not apply to those registered with UNHCR.

Reports from human rights organizations indicate that the security campaign, which first intensified visibly in border regions during the second half of 2023, has since spread into cities, roads, and checkpoints, and expanded considerably. More than 20,000 people were reported detained during 2024, according to testimonies from protection workers. That number doubled during 2025.

Once a migrant is stopped for any reason, anywhere, they are taken to a police station and, in some cases, brought before the public prosecution on charges related to residency or entry. Even when a release order is issued, it comes attached to a referral to the administrative authority, which in the vast majority of documented cases does not mean release.

It instead moves the person into a closed administrative detention track that ends with their transfer to the General Administration for Immigration, Passports, and Nationality in Abbasiya, where a deportation order to Sudan or the person’s country of nationality is issued. Detainees are then moved between police stations, detention sites, and deportation points.

One testimony from a registered Sudanese refugee, given to the Refugees Platform in Egypt, reveals the cumulative human toll of these practices. He was surprised one day when his workplace was raided and he was detained, then forced to sign a voluntary return document. Within days, after being moved between detention sites in very poor conditions, he arrived at the border crossing, where police handed him a summons to appear before the security authorities once conditions stabilized, so his security file could be reviewed.

His children did not wait long before suffering the same fate as their father, and they too were forced into a dangerous journey back. “They can’t live alone in Egypt without me. Then we had to look for somewhere else where we might find safety.”

This testimony does not document a single, isolated experience. It reveals the impact of forced return as one link in an ongoing cycle of displacement. A person sent back to a country in danger may lose their business, their livelihood, and their social network, and then find themselves forced to cross a new border in search of protection they were denied the first time.

Worse still is what human rights organizations have documented: the deportation of non-Sudanese nationals to Sudan, including children, and deportations carried out under harsh detention conditions marked by overcrowding, inadequate healthcare, and limited access to lawyers and families.

The Refugees Platform in Egypt documented 24 deaths during detention or deportation in the first half of 2026, at least 19 of them registered with UNHCR, including two children. The organization submitted a memo on these cases to the National Council for Human Rights. These are facts that call for an independent, public investigation to establish accountability and guarantee families' right to know the truth.

Security agencies began campaigns targeting facilities that provide services to refugees

Administrative deportation is not, in principle, prohibited under Egyptian law, which regulates the entry, residence, and exit of foreigners and grants the administration authority in this area. Even so, it remains a decision of extreme gravity. It does not merely end a person's residency in the country; it can send them back to a place where their life, freedom, or physical safety is at risk.

For that reason, deportation cannot be treated as an automatic procedure or a collective punishment tied to nationality or race, or to a person's inability to complete complex administrative procedures. It must be preceded by a serious, individual assessment of the person's circumstances and the risks of their return, with guaranteed access to protection claims, legal aid, and an effective appeal.

A number of UN Special Rapporteurs have expressed concern over the escalating arrest, detention, and deportation of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in Egypt, including people registered with UNHCR. In their communication, they noted a 150% increase in reported forced returns between January and August 2025, compared to the same period in 2024, affecting registered refugees, asylum seekers, and people holding registration appointments.

In its response, the Egyptian government attributed the arrests to residency violations or irregular entry, and denied detaining or deporting registered refugees.

Escalation under a new law

The passage of Asylum Law No. 164 of 2024 in December 2024, and its executive regulations, which took effect this month, did not dispel concerns that asylum in Egypt continues to be treated primarily as a security matter. If anything, the law was issued just as arrest and detention campaigns against migrants were intensifying, a striking coincidence.

Although the executive regulations were issued well past their legally mandated deadline, I reviewed a draft sent by the Cabinet in December 2025 to the offices of the interior minister and the General Intelligence Service for comment. The law, passed in December 2024, had required the regulations to be issued within six months of its entry into force; they were not issued until May 2026.

Rights advocates say this delay coincided with an expanding campaign, from late 2025 through the first half of 2026, that came to include raids on homes and workplaces, street and public-transit arrests, and the targeting of people holding UNHCR documents, residency permits, or pending renewal appointments, in addition to targeting non-Egyptian university students, particularly at Al-Azhar University, one of whom died in detention.

Security agencies began, in the early months of 2026, campaigns targeting facilities that provide services to refugees and the areas around them, arresting people as they arrived for services, waited to receive them, or left afterward.

Reports have also documented protection and residency documents being seized or ignored during arrests, weakening detainees' ability to establish their legal status before the prosecution and administrative authorities.

This raises a fundamental question about the meaning of “voluntary return.” Can a return be called “voluntary” when the form authorizing it is signed under detention, under fear, cut off from effective contact with a lawyer, and under threat of deportation to a country at war and facing grave abuses?

The same question applies to initiatives promoted under names like “return” or “caravans of hope,” when they include detained people or fail to guarantee them a genuine choice between returning, staying, and seeking protection.

This is not, then, a neutral enforcement of residency rules, nor simple “migration control.” It is a pathway that closes off avenues to protection and produces undocumentation, which turns into a violation, which turns into detention, which turns into deportation. All of this happens without an individual assessment of the risks of return, and without guaranteed access to asylum, appeal, or legal aid. Administrative deportation becomes a cover for systematic forced return.

In the next article, we examine the legal framework that is supposed to constrain the power of deportation, the limits of the legality of the detention and deportation operations carried out by the Ministry of Interior, and what Egyptian court rulings and Egypt's international obligations say about these practices.

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(*) Name was changed at the request of source to ensure their safety.