Just over half of the people arrested by the Brussels Capital-Ixelles police zone last month were illegal residents. This is what police chief Michel Goovaerts said in an interview with De Tijd. “Sometimes we pick someone up in the morning and hang them again in the afternoon.”
After the terrorist act of Abdesalem Lassoued, people without papers are in the spotlight. Lassoued, a 45-year-old Tunisian, lived illegally in our country for six years. “Anyone staying in the country illegally has no right to a place in society,” Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said in Parliament on Thursday.
Theft
It is unclear how many people without legal residence there are in our country. According to the latest research by the VUB, there are 112,000 of them. Estimates usually quote numbers between 100,000 and 200,000. What is certain is that every year 20,000 people are ordered to leave the territory for the first time.
The large group of sans-papers is diverse and consists of families, minors and single men, of whom only a minority comes into contact with the police or becomes radicalized. Because they live illegally and have no access to a legal income, many try to survive through undeclared work. Others turn to crime through drug or human trafficking, or start stealing.
The police are mainly confronted with the latter. In the month of September, just over half of those arrested in the Brussels Capital-Ixelles police zone were without papers. “We made 585 arrests, of which 298 were of illegal immigrants,” says police chief Michel Goovaerts in an interview with De Tijd. A third of those people were arrested because they were in the country illegally, but had committed no criminal offenses. That was the case for the rest. This mainly concerned theft. “Handbags or watches pulled from shoulders or wrists.” There are no data for other months at the moment.
Arrests without consequence
In most cases, this does not concern transmigrants who, for example, want to travel to the United Kingdom, but people who have a rejected asylum application and want to stay here. In the event of a criminal offence, the police contact the public prosecutor’s office and the Immigration Office, but arrests often go without result.
Goovaerts: “You cannot send Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians back because their home countries would rather get rid of them than rich. And there is no room or staff in the closed asylum centers. You can imagine the frustration among our corps.”
This article is originally published on bruzz.be
