By Chris Summers
Contributing Writer
The South African police has said it arrested more than 900 people during protests against illegal immigrants that took place across the country on Tuesday.
In a Wednesday post on X, the South African Police Service said the majority of those arrested were “illegal foreigners” and that others were arrested for harboring illegal immigrants and committing offenses of violence and looting.
Deputy national police commissioner Lt. Gen. Tebello Mosikili told a press conference that 108 of the 120 marches had been peaceful, with only a dozen requiring any police intervention.
SAPS thanked the majority of those who took part in the marches, and their leaders, for not breaking the law.
“While the vast majority of demonstrations remained peaceful, there were individuals who sought to exploit yesterday’s events to commit criminal acts,” Mosikili said. “Unfortunately for them, they quickly discovered that law enforcement was on their heels and ready to act decisively. Our members responded swiftly wherever incidents of looting, robbery, public violence and other criminal activities emerged.”
In a separate statement, the police said one person was shot dead late on Tuesday in Alexandra township, near Johannesburg, where residents were looting informal convenience stores known as spaza shops, which are often run by foreigners.
Three groups — Operation Dudula, Progressive Forces, and March and March — are at the forefront of the campaign against illegal immigration.
Ngizwe Mchunu, one of the protest leaders, said illegal immigrants were responsible for the proliferation of illicit drugs in South Africa.
“It’s a very sad story that we have been telling our government since the dawn of democracy that illegal immigration here is out of hand,” Mchunu said. “It is time for our government to put South Africa first.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Tuesday that it was wrong to blame foreigners for the economic pain being felt by South Africans.
“Addressing these challenges requires practical solutions, not the scapegoating of vulnerable people,” Ramaphosa said. “Even as we recognize the challenge of illegal immigration — which we are taking decisive action to address — our problems are in the main our own problems. And which we have a responsibility to fix ourselves.”
In recent years, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from neighboring countries such as Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique, as well as from other African nations, including Nigeria, have come to South Africa.
Leaders of the anti-immigrant movement have accused them of taking work at levels of pay unacceptably low to South Africans, and of being behind rising crime.
Three decades after the end of the apartheid regime, South Africa’s youth unemployment rate is at 46%, and the country has among the highest murder rates in the world.
But the unofficial anti-immigrant movement had set its own deadline of June 30 for undocumented immigrants to leave South Africa.
Soldiers were sent to Hillbrow, a neighborhood of Johannesburg, after two people were injured in a shooting on Tuesday, and in Durban, a foreigner allegedly jumped to his death from the eighth floor of a building on Monday after being targeted by protesters.
In a Tuesday post on X, South African journalist Hopewell Chin’ono shared a video taken by a local media outlet that showed a car belonging to a foreigner being set on fire.
“These are the kinds of idiotic, backward and criminal acts that destroy a country’s standing within the family of nations,” Chin’ono wrote. “This is not a fight against illegal immigration. This is a campaign to dehumanize and terrorize Black Africans who look exactly like the people burning this car.”
Last month, the South African government said it had processed 586 Nigerian illegal immigrants for repatriation, with the first 268 being flown out on June 11.
The governments of Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Ghana are also in the process of repatriating their nationals either by air or road.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
