As other parts of the country continued to experience protests against undocumented foreigners, a small group of Nelson Mandela Bay residents marched to air their concerns about immigrants allegedly receiving preferential treatment at Livingstone Hospital.
In a separate incident, 22 undocumented foreigners were arrested during a co-ordinated operation focused on the Korsten business area involving the SA Police Service, Metro Police, SA National Defence Force and the department of immigration as part of Operation Identity.
On Friday, civic organisations united with neighbourhood patrollers in a march from Livingstone Hospital to the North End home affairs immigration office, delivering memorandums to both.
Various organisations and community patrol groups had organised similar marches in May.
On May 22, The Herald reported on a march in New Brighton organised by Vukuzenzele and supported by Action SA and local patrollers, who delivered a memorandum to the New Brighton SAPS demanding assistance in dealing with the issue of illegal foreigners.
Outside Livingstone Hospital on Friday morning, a group of about 30 protesters picketed and chanted until acting chief executive Tembisa Notshe received their memorandum.
The memorandum claimed foreign nationals were given preferential treatment as both patients and staff at the hospital.
The group, escorted by the SAPS, also marched to North End to deliver a memorandum to the home affairs immigration office.
This document listed a number of demands for the department of home affairs and called for the closure of the refugee reception office.
Both memorandums gave the recipients seven days to respond, threatening mass mobilisation if their concerns were not heard.
Sidikiwe Action Group spokesperson Sama Mdangayi said their gripes were with government systems and not individual foreigners.
“Port Elizabeth [Gqeberha] is not by the border, so there is no need for the whole of Korsten to have Somalis and Ethiopians claiming they are asylum-seekers,” Mdangayi said.
“The fight is not against foreigners themselves, despite the conversation around the country.
“We are fighting a system that has allowed criminality to thrive, so we are fighting the government.”
Vuka Mhlali Civic Group spokesperson Nelisa Faltein said: “Our uncles, our grandmothers, our family members and people from our communities are sleeping on the floor in Livingstone Hospital while foreigners occupy beds.
“We want them to prioritise South Africans.”
Eastern Cape health spokesperson Siyanda Manana said Section 27 of the constitution guaranteed everyone the right to access healthcare services.
“We are not going to deny any sick person the right to health care.
“We are going to treat everybody in relation to the provision of quality health care.
“We have never discriminated against anybody, be it a local or a foreign patient coming to our institutions.”
With regard to concerns around the employment of foreign doctors by the department, Manana said the hiring process was overseen by the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) and also involved the South African Qualifications Authority to ensure doctors were properly screened and verified.
“We do our own quality checks and balances when it comes to the employment of foreign doctors.
“We look at the skills of the person we are employing.
“We do not overlook our own doctors that we have developed.
“We are not prioritising foreign doctors in relation to employment.”
Political analyst Dr Ntsikelelo Breakfast said it was important to note that the situation was a human rights issue.
“Human rights are not limited to South Africans; even the foreigners must enjoy their human rights,” Breakfast said.
“People are being assaulted in other parts of the country, in particular KwaZulu-Natal, and I think that is unacceptable.”
“Citizens must avoid painting everyone who is a foreign national with the same brush because you have people who are here legally, others have naturalised, and those law-abiding citizens must be painted with a different brush.”
Breakfast noted the June 30 deadline given by a number of organisations for all illegal foreign nationals to have been removed from SA.
“People must avoid being simplistic by thinking that if we do away with all the illegal foreign nationals our problems of inequality, poverty, unemployment will grow legs and walk away by themselves.
“The challenge here is that we are competing over scarcity of economic resources and that is the cause of this tension.
“The problem is that our economy is not performing well, it is not performing as it should have because of the way it has been run.”
Breakfast said the argument around schools and hospitals being over-capacitated due to illegal foreign nationals was invalid.
“The issue of foreign nationals is being used as a political battle-ground to garner votes.
“The spirit of pan-Africanism can go a long way to integrate the foreign nationals who have legal documents into our communities.”
Somali Community Service chair Ismail Ali said due to the war in their home country, Somalis qualified for refugee asylum status in SA, and through various processes with the home affairs department they could become citizens after five years.
“For the last five years there has been a delay at home affairs; they were not welcoming newcomers.
“They would be lucky to get papers.
“People go to home affairs to register themselves and because of the huge queue they are given an appointment to come back after one year or seven or eight months and that is given verbally.
“There is no paper or proof of this appointment that you can show to the police.
“They just talk to you and tell you to come back in six months’ time but when you ask them to give that to you in writing they don’t give it to you.
“Some people are going to home affairs and taking pictures of themselves there every time they visit so they can show the authorities they were there several times.
“The people who are in that queue only make up 5% of the Somali community in Nelson Mandela Bay.
“The rest are all documented.”
Ali said one of the major concerns was unauthorised civilians demanding to see proof of documentation.
“The only people who can ask you for your papers are the authorities such as police or military or immigration officers, so these people who are coming to harass the people for their papers should not be doing this.
“We run spaza shops and we are part of the economic growth.
“The products we are selling are made in SA.
“We pay taxes, we pay VAT and all those things.
“We are not here to do illegal things.
“The spaza shops are everywhere.
“We are helping the communities by opening shops close to their houses, so I don’t know if there is something else behind these protests.”
In townships across the metro, visibly anxious shop owners shared their views but did not want to be named.
In Missionvale, a Herald team visited three spaza shops which were all owned by Ethiopians.
They said they felt safe for the time being and had not had any problems in their communities.
In Zwide, two shop owners who were also Ethiopian, said they had not had any threats or felt any tension.
However, one Somali shopkeeper in Kwazakhele said he was struggling to sleep at night.
“My heart is shaking as I know something can happen at any time,” he said.
“The man who owns this shop also owns a shop in Korsten and he has been here for 23 years and he has told us what has happened in Gqeberha in the past.”
In April 2026, home affairs minister Dr Leon Schreiber said that over the past two years, more than 110,000 illegal immigrants had been deported.
“These numbers show that we are now reaping the fruits of reforms focused on greater efficiency and intensified enforcement against immigration violators.
“Through ongoing campaigns like Operation New Broom, as well the increasing use of biometric verification tools, we have already increased deportations by 46%.
“Our message remains clear: If you are in SA illegally, self-deport now before we find you and ban you from ever entering our country legally in future.”
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