About ten people will spend the night outside at the application center for asylum seekers in Ter Apel. According to the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA), they were offered the opportunity to sleep indoors, but they declined to do so.
At the application center about sixty people spend the night in waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The COA reports that some of the people who slept in various crisis emergency reception locations last night could still go to the reception location in Ter Apel today.
In addition to the normal outflow to, for example, the asylum seekers’ centers, 44 asylum seekers were today transferred from Ter Apel to crisis emergency reception locations in Zwolle, Enschede, Veenendaal and Assendelft.
Forty unaccompanied minor asylum seekers have found shelter at Inlia, a network organization that helps asylum seekers in need. That organization also helped to find another hundred places for waiting people in Ter Apel, spread over ten locations in Groningen and Drenthe. Places were found in Emmen, among others.
The crisis night shelter in Stadskanaal and Zuidbroek can also be used next night, the COA reports.
It has been overcrowded in Ter Apel for months. Last Friday, the cabinet announced measures, such as money and support, to improve reception.