South Africa “is a neglected part of the global migration story”, Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber told Bloomberg TV in October last year. Pointing to tensions between South Africans and immigrants in the country, he said that deporting undocumented people is important to “protect social cohesion”.
Those tensions have been on full display in recent weeks, with the anti-immigration movement March and March holding protests in several cities, with reports of immigrants being assaulted. Among March and March’s demands are tighter immigration controls and the deportation of undocumented immigrants.
Over the past five years, the number of people deported from South Africa has surged (Schreiber entered office in the 2024/25 financial year, so the climb in numbers started before his time).
The Department of Home Affairs launched Operation Siyasebenta (“we are working”) in 2022 to clamp down on undocumented workers. The department also runs a joint operation with the police and the Department of Labour called Operation Shanela (“sweep clean”), focused on various crimes, including immigration-related offences.
57,784 people were deported from the country in the 2025/26 financial year, compared to 14,589 in 2020/21, when the covid pandemic presumably weakened the state’s ability to deport undocumented people.
But while numbers have increased since 2020, they are still less than the average of 67,000 people deported every year between 2010 and 2019. In 2007, more than 300,000 people were deported.
We did not include the years before 2020 in the chart above, because those numbers are provided by StatsSA, which reports per calendar year (Jan-Dec), rather than financial year (April-March).
Chart produced by The Outlier in partnership with GroundUp
Source: Original report at GroundUp.
