In the coming period, the municipality of Goes will receive up to four hundred extra asylum seekers in the Zeelandhallen. The event location was already used for the emergency reception of 320 asylum seekers and hundreds more are now being added. A reception center for hundreds of asylum seekers will also open on Saturday in Zoutkamp, so that State Secretary Eric van der Burg (Justice and Security, VVD) does not expect that people will have to sleep outside the application center in Ter Apel in the coming period.
The crisis shelter in Goes, which has been approved by the College of Mayor and Aldermen, will be open at least until September 20. The first asylum seekers for this reception are expected on Saturday. The municipality has set the conditions that no nuisance or asylum seekers from safe countries are received. “The police have indicated that sufficient police capacity can be deployed for this crisis relief,” said Mayor Margo Mulder, according to ANP news agency. Extra officers will also be deployed in the Zoutkamp in Groningen, where space has been made for approximately seven hundred asylum seekers on a Defense site.
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The reception in Zoutkamp is part of a new system to prevent people from having to spend the night outside the application center in Ter Apel. New asylum seekers are given a number on arrival at Ter Apel and are transferred to Zoutkamp until they can be helped with their registration. Then they go to another reception location. According to State Secretary Van der Burg, this system and the extra reception places mean that no one has to sleep outside. In the night from Thursday to Friday this still happened: three hundred people slept outside the center in Ter Apel.