The deportation of Syrian journalist Samer Mokhtar from Egypt has sparked widespread controversy in recent days, particularly because it occurred suddenly and without prior warning. This came despite the fact that he had earlier received a phone call from an official at the Passports Authority indicating that his residency renewal issue could be resolved, following an appeal made by his former wife, Egyptian journalist Iman Adel, after the procedures had stalled.
Iman had previously posted a video on her personal Facebook page calling on the authorities to intervene. In the video, she explained that her former husband—who is Syrian and has lived in Egypt for 14 years—was facing deportation despite having legal residency. According to her, the Passports Authority had informed them that there were instructions preventing the renewal of residency permits for Syrians who are not investors.
A few days after the appeal, which gained wide attention online, the family received another call from the Passports Authority stating that the residency permit could be collected. On the morning of Saturday, March 7, Iman went with their son—who is not yet eight years old—and his father to the authority’s headquarters to complete the procedures.
There, Samer was asked to finalize certain procedures at the Criminal Investigation Department, but his former wife and son were not allowed to accompany him. He then disappeared from sight until the authority closed later that evening. After hours of waiting, Iman learned that he was being held at El-Waili Police Station and would be deported. On Sunday morning, she confirmed that he had been informed of a deportation decision sending him first to Lebanon.
Despite the appeals, the deportation order was carried out at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 8. He was sent to Lebanon, where he remained stranded for several hours at Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport before being forced to travel onward to Syria, without the opportunity to say goodbye to his young son.
During the hours in which journalist Iman Adel documented the crisis surrounding the father of her child—an ordeal that unfolded over the course of Saturday and Sunday—a fierce digital campaign emerged targeting the journalist and her child. At the same time, the campaign amplified rhetoric calling for the forced deportation of refugees, even when their legal status is valid.
This campaign forms part of a recurring pattern of digital violence and hate speech directed at refugees, migrants, and their families inside Egypt. Such waves of hostility resurface from time to time and are occasionally accompanied by arbitrary security measures against them.
Residency Under Threat
Nour Khalil, Executive Director of the Refugee Platform in Egypt, explains that a significant number of cases have already been documented involving the cancellation of certain types of residency permits, often without consideration for their social consequences, as illustrated by the case of Syrian journalist Samer Mokhtar.
Khalil notes that 2024 witnessed more than 20,000 deportations of Sudanese nationals alone, while the figure doubled in 2025. He adds that many of those deported have families living in Egypt—either of the same nationality or different ones—and some have children who were born in Egypt or even hold Egyptian nationality.
Speaking to Zawia3, Khalil stresses that suspending these forms of residency or threatening their stability does not only affect individuals but extends its impact to the broader community. He refers to what he describes as a pattern of “forced documentation denial” affecting refugees in Egypt over the past three years.
This means that any foreign national, migrant, refugee, student, or investor who applies for residency may face arbitrary rejection or have their residency status revoked, resulting in severe consequences such as detention, deportation, children being barred from enrolling in schools, and women being discouraged from filing complaints when subjected to abuse. It may also involve the imposition of high financial costs to obtain specific residency permits. According to Khalil, these measures are sometimes accompanied by penalties related to “lack of documentation,” imposed without prior warning.
In the same context, United Nations experts have expressed deep concern over the escalating deportations, arbitrary arrests, and ongoing violations of the rights of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in Egypt—particularly affecting women and children.
In a statement, the experts said that the implementation of Egypt’s new asylum law (Law No. 164 of 2024), which came into effect in December 2024, has contributed to a surge in deportations throughout 2025, targeting large numbers of Sudanese and Syrian nationals, including entire families, without conducting individual assessments of the risk of refoulement.
According to the figures cited in the statement, approximately 1.5 million Sudanese have fled to Egypt as of January 2026, while the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had registered more than one million refugees and asylum seekers by December 2025, including over 830,000 Sudanese and more than 117,000 Syrians, the majority of whom are women and children. The experts warned that this climate of fear exposes refugees to heightened vulnerability, including exploitation, forced labor, and gender-based violence. They called on Egypt to respect the principle of non-refoulement, protect family unity, prioritize the best interests of the child, and guarantee fundamental rights for all refugees and migrants.
The principle of non-refoulement is a cornerstone of international refugee and human rights law. It prohibits states from expelling or returning any person—whether a refugee or an asylum seeker—to territories where their life or freedom would be threatened because of their race, religion, nationality, social affiliation, or political opinion, or where they may face torture or other forms of abuse.
For his part, human rights lawyer Halim Hanish argues that the recent security campaigns targeting foreigners in Egypt—whether refugees or legal residents—lack any clear legal justification.
Speaking to Zawia3, Hanish explains that cases documented by human rights organizations, including individuals holding UNHCR documentation, show that arrests and deportations have affected people with valid legal residency. He describes the deportation of Syrian journalist Samer Mokhtar as a “warning sign,” noting that Mokhtar had been summoned to the Passports Authority to complete his paperwork before being detained and deported without the opportunity to challenge the decision, in what he considers a clear violation of legal safeguards.
Hanish emphasizes that such practices contradict Egypt’s international and constitutional obligations, including the 1951 Refugee Convention, the Organization of African Unity Convention, the Egyptian Constitution, and domestic refugee and criminal procedure laws. As a result, these policies place foreign residents in an extremely fragile and precarious legal position.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International issued a statement on February 16, expressing concern about the renewed wave of arbitrary arrests and unlawful deportations of refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt over recent months. The organization noted that many of these measures targeted individuals based on residency-related legal issues, in violation of the principle of non-refoulement and the protection guarantees established under international law and Egypt’s own asylum legislation.
Amnesty also reported that some of those arrested or deported were registered with UNHCR, while documented cases included individuals from Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, and other African countries who were detained after being stopped in the streets or at their workplaces and having their identification documents checked.
Hate Speech
The forced deportation of Syrian journalist Samer Mokhtar from Egypt coincided with a wide digital attack that did not target him alone, but also included his former wife and their young son. The campaign featured calls for the deportation of refugees from the country, demands to reconsider the Egyptian nationality law, and proposals to prevent children from obtaining the nationality of their Egyptian mothers.
Syrian journalist Zeina Rahim believes that hate speech consistently targets the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in society, noting that such rhetoric is never directed at wealthy families or economically powerful classes.
Speaking to Zawia3, Rahim explains that this indicates a clear political redirection of anger and frustration resulting from economic crises and regional conflicts away from the authorities responsible for them and toward weaker groups that become easy targets for attack. She adds that these campaigns also reinforce a sense of belonging among the loudest and most hostile groups, similar to racist movements in Europe whose internal cohesion is built around shared hatred.
Rahim also points to what she describes as a deadly paradox in the Arab region. Despite the catastrophic consequences of hate speech witnessed in past generations through civil wars, sectarian and ethnic violence, and religious crimes, many continue to reproduce the same rhetoric. She refers in particular to situations of mass violence, such as in Gaza, where systematic campaigns often seek to strip victims of their humanity. Rahim notes that many people criticize Western and Israeli hate discourse while later reproducing similar rhetoric themselves, reflecting a dangerous double standard in confronting violence and hate speech.
Nour Khalil, Executive Director of the Refugee Platform in Egypt, explains that hate and incitement campaigns against refugees in Egypt have been appearing regularly on social media since 2021, often linked to regional or domestic events, or used to divert attention from cases of abuse or administrative failures attributed to migrants through human rights or journalistic reports.
In an interview with Zawia3, Khalil notes that the most recent campaign has shown several alarming developments, including its persistence alongside ongoing arrest campaigns on the ground. He adds that social media accounts themselves have circulated evidence of abuses such as the detention of children or the deportation of individuals, sometimes shared in a manner resembling public boasting, which reinforces the impression among organizers that their messages have reached the authorities.
He further explains that the campaign has targeted the accounts of refugees and their families, as well as activists and organizations publishing reports or statements. This resulted in the spread of a large volume of misleading information, repeatedly echoed by lawyers, journalists, and public figures, creating a climate of informational confusion in which victims were transformed into perpetrators within public debate.
In a report titled “No Safe Haven: An Unprecedented Security Campaign Against Refugees in Egypt,” the Refugee Platform documented that January 2026 witnessed a clear escalation of hate speech and incitement against refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants across Egypt’s digital space, occurring simultaneously with an intensification of security measures on the ground. This dynamic effectively contributed to justifying these measures and normalizing them within public discourse.
The platform recorded intensive activity by a large number of social media accounts, many of them lacking clear identities or using misleading personal information, which published fabricated or unverified content about refugees. These narratives linked refugees’ presence to crime and the economic crisis, while amplifying either real or fabricated individual incidents to incite public opinion on the basis of nationality or skin color.
The report also documented that these campaigns coincided with parallel attacks targeting civil society organizations and human rights defenders working on refugee issues. These attacks included defamation campaigns and accusations of “treason” or “threatening national security,” as well as coordinated hashtags and posts directed against organizations documenting violations, including the Refugee Platform in Egypt and its partners.
During the same period, a large number of newly created accounts appeared online, often sharing similar linguistic patterns and content while reposting identical material with minor modifications. According to the report, this reflects the presence of a coordinated campaign aimed at amplifying hate speech and spreading disinformation, in clear violation of Egypt’s constitutional and international commitments to combat discrimination and incitement to hatred and violence.
The Economic Crisis and Refugees
Security policies targeting refugees and asylum seekers have coincided with the worsening economic and social crisis, according to what the Refugee Platform in Egypt documented in its report. At the same time, hate speech and incitement have escalated across both traditional and digital media, where the presence of refugees is increasingly portrayed as directly linked to rising living pressures and crime.
For his part, Nour Khalil categorically denies that refugees have any negative impact on the Egyptian economy. He stresses that migrants and refugees in fact contribute to supporting the economy through financial transfers and the services in which they participate. Khalil argues that Egypt’s economic pressures have their own global and domestic causes, and that refugees in Egypt do not constitute an economic burden on the state but instead represent an active contribution to economic activity.
In recent years, the Egyptian government has received a wide package of international grants and loans related to the management of migration and refugee issues, amid the growing number of refugees and asylum seekers on its territory, particularly following the outbreak of the war in Sudan in 2023. The European Union has been among the most prominent supporters. In 2024, the EU provided €9 million in humanitarian assistance to support refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt. The funding included activities related to health, education, and basic protection in response to displacement flows from conflict zones such as Sudan and other areas.
In March 2024, a broader financial package worth approximately €7.4 billion for the period between 2024 and 2027 was announced. The package includes concessional loans, investments, and grants aimed at supporting economic stability in Egypt while strengthening cooperation on migration and refugee management and limiting irregular migration toward Europe.
Egypt received an initial €1 billion tranche from this assistance package in April 2024, followed by a second €1 billion tranche in January 2026 as part of the Macro-Financial Assistance mechanism, which is intended to ease short-term financing pressures and support spending on social and human development programs.
Cairo also received a €12.2 million European grant in January 2024 to implement a joint program with United Nations agencies providing health, education, and protection services to refugees and host communities. In addition, the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund allocated $6 million to support refugees fleeing the conflict in Sudan, funding that was provided to the Egyptian government in December 2024.
Beyond humanitarian and development assistance, €200 million were allocated to support migration management and border control, while €80 million were directed to the Egyptian Coast Guard to provide rescue boats and conduct security training. The Egyptian Armed Forces also received €20 million from the European Peace Facility to strengthen national security and protect civilians, alongside training programs for law enforcement agencies focused on combating migrant smuggling and organized crime.
These measures reflect the scale of the increasing pressures facing Egypt as it hosts large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, particularly amid an escalating economic and social crisis.
At the same time, however, while Egypt receives billions of euros and dollars in grants and assistance from the European Union and the United Nations to support refugees and strengthen economic stability, refugees themselves face targeted security campaigns on the ground alongside digital campaigns accusing them of being responsible for the country’s economic crisis and calling for their deportation.
