Epping and the Data Behind South Africa's 2026 Migrant Departures

The Epping site

Over the weekend of 4 to 5 July 2026, an open area beside the Langa train station in Epping became a temporary gathering point for hundreds of people. The Department of Home Affairs had been operating a voluntary repatriation centre there, screening foreign nationals who wished to return to their countries before boarding buses north. When the centre closed, people who had arrived too late to be processed, or who could not be accommodated on the available buses, remained on the open ground, adjacent to an informal settlement.

Close-up of the site. The Department of Home Affairs office on Grenville Avenue in Epping served as the voluntary repatriation centre; people gathered on open ground toward the Langa Metrorail station, beside an informal settlement in Langa. The office and station markers are precise; the open-ground marker is approximate, based on reporting. Select a marker for detail. Map data: OpenStreetMap and Carto. Requires an internet connection to load.

Reported figures moved quickly. Eyewitness News described more than 700 Zimbabwean and Malawian men, women and children at the site over the weekend. By Monday, 6 July, roughly 250 Zimbabwean nationals remained, waiting for buses to the border. The response on site came largely from civil society: volunteers and residents provided food and sanitary supplies, and the disaster-relief organisation Gift of the Givers deployed a medical team. Its head, Dr Naeem Kathrada, said the City of Cape Town did not grant permission for a tent to be erected on the field.

On Monday, the Western Cape Government stated that it had, together with municipalities, national departments, humanitarian organisations and faith partners, concluded its coordinated repatriation operation, and that everyone who had "presented themselves" at the Epping offices had departed. Live reporting from the site the same day described hundreds of people still present. Both statements can hold at once: the official operation had wound down, while people continued to arrive after it did. Premier Alan Winde advised those still seeking to leave to approach their embassies or consulates and to use standard Home Affairs channels, and confirmed that free transport would not continue past that point.

The scale of departures

The Epping site was one point in a larger, countrywide movement of people toward the borders through late June and early July. The clearest measure is the Border Management Authority's running count of departures, which combines deportations and voluntary repatriations. That count rose steeply over roughly a month.

In the two weeks to the end of June, the Authority counted roughly 13,000 departures. By 3 July the total had passed 35,000, and by 8 July it stood above 50,000 across all border posts, with about 38,000 of those processed at a single new centre near the Limpopo town of Musina. Set against the estimated 2.4 million documented and undocumented migrants that Statistics South Africa reckons live in the country, this represents a small share of the whole, on the order of two percent, though it was concentrated in particular towns, farms and communities rather than spread evenly.

These headline numbers should be read with care, because different authorities count different things. South Africa's Border Management Authority counts people leaving through its ports; the Zimbabwean government counts its own citizens arriving home; the Musina centre counts people processed on site. The figures use different start dates and definitions, overlap one another, and cannot be added together. Placed side by side, they indicate the same broad order of magnitude while illustrating how partial the counting remains.

The Border Management Authority, by the numbers

To understand the July departures, it helps to see the institution that recorded and, in part, drove them. The Border Management Authority is a relatively new agency, established in 2023 to consolidate control of South Africa's ports of entry. Its own published figures show that the 2026 departures were not an isolated spike but an acceleration of an enforcement trend already well under way.

Deportations have risen sharply and steadily. In the 2023/24 financial year, Home Affairs recorded 39,672 deportations. That climbed roughly 30 percent to 51,560 in 2024/25, and a further 12 percent to 57,784 in 2025/26, a cumulative increase of about 46 percent over two years. The department attributes the rise to intensified enforcement and the wider use of biometric verification.

Interception at the border tells a parallel story. Since its establishment, the Authority reports having intercepted or prevented more than 542,684 people from entering the country without authorisation. Its own breakdown identifies three main categories: undocumented persons, those declared undesirable for overstaying, and those found inadmissible on fraudulent or expired documents. These categories are the Authority's largest, though its published sub-totals do not sum precisely to the headline figure.

The Authority has also invested heavily in technology and infrastructure: drones, body-worn cameras, biometric and facial-recognition systems, and a committed R12.5 billion to redevelop six major land border posts, including Beitbridge into Zimbabwe and Lebombo into Mozambique. Enforcement has periodically reduced illegal crossings; the Authority reported that Easter 2026 interceptions fell about 24 percent year on year, to 4,763. Daily throughput at the busiest ports remains substantial, with tens of thousands of legitimate travellers processed in a single day at crossings such as OR Tambo, Lebombo and Beitbridge.

Read together, these figures place the July departures in perspective. The state already had a scaling enforcement apparatus, rising deportation numbers, and a purpose-built border authority. The events of late June and July did not create that machinery; they redirected it, at speed, toward a specific and largely voluntary outflow concentrated on two neighbouring nationalities.

From Cape Town to the border

The July operation had a distinct geography. People gathered at collection points in cities such as Cape Town and Durban, were transported north to a temporary processing centre near Musina in Limpopo, and then crossed at the Beitbridge port of entry into Zimbabwe, with many Malawian nationals continuing onward through Zimbabwe. The map below marks the main nodes in that route and the figures associated with each. Select a marker to see the detail.

Nodes in the 2026 return route: the Epping site in Cape Town and the Durban collection point, the Temporary Repatriation Processing Centre near Musina, and the Beitbridge crossing into Zimbabwe. The line indicates the general direction of travel, not an exact road route. Map data: OpenStreetMap and Carto. Requires an internet connection to load.

The Musina centre was established on 26 June on Department of Public Works land about 15 kilometres outside the town, after the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Migration resolved to consolidate operations in Limpopo. Officials said the site could hold around 20,000 people, with processing, resting and loading areas, boreholes for water and mobile toilets. By early July some 6,000 people were living inside, with tens of thousands more already processed through it. At Beitbridge, the Authority reported clearing more than 2,000 people on single days, and coordinated batches such as one operation that processed over 1,300 people, including 673 Malawian and 202 Zimbabwean nationals returned in a single day.

Who was affected, and why

The composition of those leaving was consistent across the reporting: predominantly Zimbabwean and Malawian nationals, the two largest and longest-established migrant communities in South Africa. Many of those at Epping had worked on farms in the Western Cape. The breakdown of the first fortnight of the enforcement drive shows how concentrated the outflow was among these two groups.

Migration across Southern Africa is driven by an overlapping set of pressures: unemployment and economic hardship at home, financial and political instability, established family networks, and the search for work and schooling. These reasons rarely act alone. A person may leave Zimbabwe for lack of work, then remain in South Africa because returning would end the income that supports relatives at home. Analysts describe most migrants as neither simply victims nor simply job-takers, but as people making constrained decisions, often filling low-paid roles in farming, security and domestic work.

The economic connection is measurable. South Africa is the largest source of remittances in the Southern African region. In 2021, roughly 37 percent of the money sent home to Zimbabwe originated in South Africa, which then hosted more than 690,000 Zimbabwean migrants; the South Africa to Zimbabwe corridor is the busiest inbound remittance route in the SADC bloc. A consequence follows directly: when a farm worker is returned, a household across the border loses income at the same moment. For many, repatriation is not a reset but a return to the conditions that prompted the original journey.

Conditions on the ground

Humanitarian responses are assessed along a small number of standard dimensions. Each was under pressure at Epping and, later, at the Musina centre.

Individual accounts gathered by GroundUp and other outlets at the Musina centre illustrate the material dimension of departure. Ntombinkosi Nkomo, who had worked on farms near Robertson, told reporters she had left a refrigerator, beds and other belongings behind when she fled. A man who had lived in Strand for more than five years described a landlord who declined to accept his July rent. A Malawian who had spent seven years in Gqeberha left with a single bag. Taken together, such accounts show how an administrative decision translates, at the household level, into lost possessions, interrupted work and displacement.

The trigger: an unofficial "deadline"

The immediate context for the July departures was a self-declared 30 June 2026 "deadline" for undocumented immigrants to leave South Africa, promoted by an anti-immigration movement called March and March, founded in 2025 and based in KwaZulu-Natal. The deadline had no legal force. It spread through social-media posts and pamphlets that resembled official government notices, and the government publicly stated that the notices were fake.

Its practical effect, however, was real. Some landlords evicted tenants and some employers dismissed workers, citing fear of penalties or unrest. On 30 June, an estimated 20 groups, including March and March and the movement Operation Dudula, staged around 120 protests across the country; turnout was large in Durban and Johannesburg and small in Cape Town. Reporting attributes at least four deaths to the broader period as tensions rose, and earlier incidents included the burning of homes in an informal settlement near Mossel Bay, where Mozambique reported five of its nationals killed.

The government's own position combined condemnation of xenophobia with intensified enforcement. In a national address on 7 June, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a "Comprehensive Approach for Migration Management": workplace inspections, prosecution of employers who hire undocumented workers, an expanded Border Management Authority, dedicated immigration courts to fast-track deportations, and thousands of new labour inspectors. He warned against making migrants scapegoats even as the enforcement figures charted above continued to climb.

How the timeline developed

Oversight and rights

A state is entitled to manage its borders and enforce immigration law. The question raised during the July events, put directly by the South African Human Rights Commission, was whether the process remained consistent with the Constitution and with the country's regional and international human-rights obligations.

The Commission was critical of the conduct of the operation, and did not confine that criticism to the South African authorities. It also expressed concern that some foreign governments had invited their nationals to present for repatriation without providing the resources to carry it out smoothly, leaving people caught between a South African process that had wound down and consular systems that were not ready to receive them. Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs began a two-day oversight visit to the Musina centre and the Beitbridge border on 7 July to assess capacity and administrative adequacy.

The broader pattern is not new. South Africa has experienced episodes of anti-migrant violence before, notably in 2008, when attacks killed at least 62 people, and again in 2015 and 2019. Each has followed a similar sequence of economic strain, political messaging, unrest or threat, and displacement. The United Nations has documented that global displacement has reached historically high levels over the past decade. The July 2026 events were not a refugee emergency on that scale, but they reflected a recurring gap between migration policy and humanitarian capacity, a gap that became visible at the Epping site.

Two conclusions are supported by the data. First, the departures were an acceleration of an existing enforcement trend rather than a sudden aberration; the deportation curve was already rising steeply before June. Second, the humanitarian shortfall, in shelter, sanitation and coordination, was met more by volunteers and faith groups than by the state, and it is that shortfall, rather than the raw pace of removals, that the oversight process will need to address.

Questions & answers

Sources & references