South Africa has started deporting undocumented Zimbabweans, with more that 600 deportees having arrived in their home country through the Beit Bridge Border Post on Wednesday and Thursday a week ago.

The first batch of 261 illegal immigrants, mostly men, arrived at the Beit Bridge border in four luxurious buses on Wednesday. The second group of 370 was brought back home on Thursday.

According to South African Home Affairs officials who were escorting them, the deportees were the first group of undocumented Zimbabweans to be deported. The South African government recently announced that it would resume the deportation of Zimbabweans who failed to regularise their stay in that country during the recent documentation exercise. “We brought a total of 261 deportees, most of which are ex-convicts, including those who were recently rounded up around the Johannesburg area,” said an SA Home Affairs official, who declined to be named.

The undocumented Zimbabweans were temporarily kept at Lindela Detention Centre outside Johannesburg. When Limpopo Mirror visited Beit Bridge Border Post, our reporter observed that some illegal cross-border transporters had already started touting for “clients” as the deportees shouted through the windows of their buses in response to the transporters.

“Let´s meet at the local Caltex service station and we will help you to cross back to South Africa. That is an easy task for us,” shouted one illegal cross-border transport operator. Most of them charge between R300 and R800 to facilitate smooth passage of undocumented Zimbabweans into South Africa.

The Zimbabwean assistant regional immigration manager at Beit Bridge Border Post, Mrs Tamari Shadaya, confirmed that they had received the deportees “We received the deportees and our officials vetted them before they proceeded to the local International Organisation for Migration (IOM) centre. We are expecting more deportations during the course of the month,” she said.