State racism of the Foreigners’ Office and the CGRA
01/12/2021
In the last few days we have received several desperate calls from the women’s detention centre in Holsbeek
All of them come from the DRC.
They all arrived in September or October and were arrested at the airport by the federal police and locked up by order of the Foreigners’ Office.
They all applied for asylum on arrival.All of them received a negative response to their asylum application by the CGRA, following increasingly restrictive criteria for access to international protection.
All of them receive expulsion tickets to Kinshasa. All are desperate. They do not want to return to their country, some have family here, others claim to be in danger in DRC.
In principle, an asylum seeker is housed in an open centre until their application can be processed. In these cases, as soon as they arrived, they were all arrested on the basis of a daily practice of racial profiling by the aeronautical police and put in a closed centre on the orders of the Office des Étrangers.
An asylum application from a closed centre is fastidious. It is very difficult to collect documents from a closed centre. Access to a proper legal assistant and possible support (family, community, activists, etc.) is also prevented by this distance and detention.
While procedures are often very long, the CGRA shows an unusual speed when it comes to rejecting asylum seekers sequestered in closed centres and suspected of being “flight risks”.
*Once again, the efficient coordination between the federal police, the Aliens Office and the CGRA has allowed a rigorous and negrophobic screening at the border, the immediate detention and the refusal to grant asylum to these women in order to intimidate and expel them as quickly as possible.
If you ask for protection, something is wrong. They are fleeing a difficult life in their country and are suspected of disappearing as soon as they arrive in our country by the Office des Étrangers and are therefore locked up. They find themselves in a prison, at the mercy of the decisions of some bureaucrats paid to practice criminal migration policies.
FREEDOM FOR ALL !
