In recent months, the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) has sent unidentified hundreds of asylum seekers who had only recently arrived in the Netherlands to emergency reception locations. The National Police was furious about this, for fear of losing sight of undocumented migrants. This is shown by research by NRC and is confirmed by the COA and the police.
The transfer took place with asylum seekers who wanted to report to Ter Apel, but for whom there was no place due to the reception crisis. They were rushed unchecked in coaches to emergency shelters elsewhere. That is against the agreements: aliens must first give fingerprints, show documents to the police and take a photo before they can be transported and received. According to sources from NRC about 1,200 asylum seekers have been sent on in this way since May. The fear is that this could happen again if it gets too busy in Ter Apel.
As early as May, the tension between the COA and the police ran so high that the top police temporarily withdrew from an important crisis meeting – including the COA, the Immigration Service IND and the Ministry of Justice and Security. The police felt abandoned because the COA had promised that asylum seekers would no longer be transferred in this way. A police spokesperson says that the organizations are “now” meeting with each other again. The registration backlog will be eliminated as soon as possible, the police said.
The COA says that mobile identification and registration teams still identify asylum seekers in the emergency reception locations. Sources contradict this and say that there is still discussion about this, because the police do not want to send their people criss-cross into the country and only want to register asylum seekers in Ter Apel and Budel.
The police and the COA have been arguing for some time about the supervision of asylum seekers. The then Minister of Justice Ferd Grapperhaus (CDA) promised almost a year and a half ago that the COA would enter the location data of residents into an existing system on a daily basis. The COA failed to do this, a police spokesperson confirmed, despite repeated insistence from the police. As a result, the police do not know exactly where the asylum seekers live. According to a police spokesperson, it is now necessary to ask who is located per reception location. According to the spokesperson, this takes “extra time and actions and is not ideal”.
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The COA says that it does enter the location data of asylum seekers in the system, but that due to ‘capacity shortages and the various forms of reception’ at COA, the police may not always know where an asylum seeker is. “We are not aware that the police have repeatedly urged the whereabouts of residents to be entered into the system over the past year.”
Exchange stopped
Until a few years ago, COA shared personal data such as name, age, religion, ethnicity and country of origin with the police on a daily basis and automatically. This data exchange stopped after NRC in 2020 wrote that this was illegal. All this data had to be erased from various police systems.
The police then repeatedly asked COA to share more information in the interest of national security. In a letter to the COA, she emphasized that sharing data was necessary, because otherwise signals of human trafficking or terrorism may be missed. The COA did not concede to this.
In January 2021, Grapperhaus wrote to the House of Representatives that a solution had been found so that the police and COA could still share data from asylum seekers. He promised that COA would put the data into an existing system. That is still incomplete.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 2, 2022