CAIRO: Abdallah Bahr waited with his family for hours in the scorching sun outside the UN refugee agency’ Cairo office, hoping to receive the asylum identification cards that would allow them to stay in Egypt after fleeing Sudan’s war.
They had arrived at 2 a.m. in the morning, and finally got the precious yellow cards at 1 p.m.
“It was like hell over the past months. We were barely leaving home and walking on the streets. Today it is a little bit of a sigh of relief for us,” Bahr, a 32-year-old father of two, told Context.
The long wait was just the latest ordeal for the family, who arrived in Egypt in early January after four days traveling through the desert fleeing war in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.
The cards should offer a degree of legal protection, prevent forced returns and entitle holders to some services, including health care.
But refugees fear the cards will not shield them from the xenophobia in Egypt that has risen since Sudanese refugees started arriving in large numbers after war broke out in their homeland in April last year.
“It is still not safe for us even after we took this card. We are afraid that a police officer would stop us and ask for our residency cards which cannot be issued now and take two years,” said Bahr’s wife, Afrah Idris.
Idris said that over the past months the family had avoided walking on main streets and taking public transport.
“We only went out to areas close to the house, the market, or to visit some friends who live nearby,” the 28-year-old said.
She said two relatives, who did not have residency or asylum cards, were arrested and deported to Sudan three weeks ago.
The war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has created one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises and displaced more than 10 million people inside Sudan and beyond its borders.
The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, says more than 500,000 Sudanese have fled to Egypt since the conflict began.
But now those refugees, people like Bahr and his family and citizens from other African countries, are caught in a legal limbo created by a new Egyptian law.
The law, enacted in September last year, requires all undocumented migrants, or those whose residency permits have expired, to regularise their status by the end of September — extending a previous June deadline.
The administrative fees associated with this process can exceed $1,000, a prohibitive sum for many.
For those unable to meet the requirements, registering as an asylum seeker with the UNHCR is an alternative — and that can take months. Bahr began the process one month after arriving, but only got the cards in September.
“If I had $1,000, I wouldn’t have come to the UNHCR,” he said. “We would not have waited for so long in fear.”
CHANGE OF LAW
Egypt initially facilitated the entry of people fleeing Sudan. But less than two months after the war started, Cairo suspended a treaty commitment to visa-free access for Sudanese women, children and men over 49, slowing entries.
Officials blamed ‘illicit activities,’ including the issuance of fraudulent visas, as the reason for the change.
The visa process proved to be a significant hurdle and instead thousands of Sudanese embarked on perilous journeys across the desert to enter Egypt illegally.
After receiving yellow asylum-seeker cards from the UNHCR in Egypt, Sudanese need an appointment with the Egyptian Immigration and Passport Department to apply for residency.
However, due to the number of applicants, wait times for these appointments have stretched to more than two years.
Some 9 million migrants from 133 countries live in Egypt, the International Organization for Migration said in 2022.
According to the UNHCR, only 770,120 individuals from 62 countries were officially registered as refugees as of Sept 9.
Many others have managed to live and work in Egypt for extended periods thanks to a degree of official tolerance. That was until the new decree was issued.
Seham Mustafa, a parliamentarian with the Nation’s Future Party that backs President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, said Egypt had struggled to deal with the numbers of displaced people.
“To better manage the refugee crisis, Egypt has launched this legislation, which aims to create a comprehensive database of refugees, enabling the government to provide targeted assistance while also ensuring national security,” she said.
SECURITY CRACKDOWN
Since January, the government has intensified security operations to verify the residency status of foreigners.
While there is no official data on the number of foreigners deported from Egypt since last year, Amnesty International said in a report in June that Egypt had carried out mass arrests and unlawful deportations of thousands of Sudanese refugees.
The rights group said it had documented 12 incidents in which Egyptian authorities returned an estimated total of 800 Sudanese nationals between January and March this year without giving them the chance to claim asylum or challenge deportation decisions.
Egypt’s State Information Service and the cabinet spokesperson did not respond to requests for a comment on the Amnesty report.
This crackdown drove thousands of Sudanese refugees to the UNHCR to get registration appointments, and the agency said that had placed a strain on its services.
Each day, said UNHCR communication officer Christine Beshay “we’ve seen an average of 4,000 people coming to our offices, up from 800 before the war.”
Beshay said the number of asylum seekers from Sudan registered before the start of the war in Sudan was 60,779.
“Today, this number is 482,995, and it is increasing daily,” she said.
Beshay said Sudanese people made up 62.7 percent of the total number of asylum seekers registered with the agency in Egypt.
’WE DO NOT WANT SUDANESE’
The arrival of refugees has also inflamed social tensions with some Egyptians blaming Sudanese and other foreigners for driving up rental prices.
Egyptian TV commentators cited what they called the burden of millions of migrants during a period of high inflation and economic strain.
Idris, Bahr’s wife, said she had tried to enrol her two sons in schools in Giza, Cairo’s sister city where many Sudanese have settled, but the schools refused.
“They told us, ‘We do not want Sudanese’,” she said. “My sons have now lost two years of their lives because of this war and because we are not welcomed in Egypt.”
“Where should we go? We do not have any other place.”
Ragaa Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a 27-year-old Sudanese refugee who entered Egypt illegally with her cousin in August, said she wished people could support each other.
She left her mother and two sisters behind in Khartoum, where she worked in a printing shop, because she needed medical treatment.
“My arms have burns due to fighting back in Khartoum,” she said. “If it was not for that, I would never have left Khartoum.”
She is now living with her cousin in the Ard El Lewa neighborhood of Giza in a small apartment that costs them 4,000 Egyptian pounds ($83) per month.
“The landlord told us that the rent would go up to 8,000 Egyptian pounds in a few months. How can we afford that? We only came with very little money.”
