Years in the Shadows: Three Long-Term Undocumented Residents Deported from Malta in Dawn Operation

Three Men Repatriated After Years of Living in Malta’s Shadows
By Hot Malta Newsroom

Valletta – At dawn on Tuesday, as shopkeepers along Merchant Street raised their shutters and the first pastizzi carts hissed with oil, three men boarded a military-chartered flight at Malta International Airport and disappeared into the sky. None of them had ever held a Maltese ID card, yet all had called the island home for more than a decade—one since before Malta adopted the euro. Their forced repatriation, confirmed by Identity Malta and witnessed by this reporter, ends a quiet cat-and-mouse game that illustrates both the island’s magnetism and the tightening net of its migration policy.

The men—two Bangladeshi nationals aged 41 and 38, and a 45-year-old Egyptian—were discovered during a routine joint sweep in Hamrun last week. According to the Agency for the Welfare of Asylum Seekers (AWAS), none had filed asylum applications; instead they survived on cash-in-hand construction gigs, sharing a €250-a-month flat above a shuttered butcher. Neighbours assumed they were “regular” because they spoke fluent Maltese, greeted parish priests on Sunday and poured wine at the village festa like everyone else.

Yet their limbo was never far away. One of the men, who gave his name only as “Rashid”, told Hot Malta through the airport fence that he had tried to legalise his stay in 2015 after an amnesty was announced. “The queue at Ħamrun police station went round the block twice. When I finally got inside, they said my passport copy was blurred. By the time I returned with a new one, the deadline had passed.”

Malta has offered four general regularisation programmes since 2003, the last in 2020 targeting migrants who could prove three years’ continuous residence and tax contributions. Each window, however, is narrower than the last. Parliamentary Secretary for Migration Rebecca Buttigieg defended this week’s operation, saying “firm but fair enforcement protects the integrity of our labour market and safeguards those who play by the rules.” Unions disagree: the GWU has long argued that undocumented workers prop up the plastering, catering and agriculture sectors that Maltese youth increasingly shun.

Indeed, the trio’s footprints are everywhere once you look. Their Hamrun landlord, 68-year-old Ġużeppi, wipes away tears describing how “Rashid retiled my bathroom for half the normal price, then stayed to drink tea with my wife.” In Marsa, the Egyptian—Mohamed—was known as “the doctor of bicycles”, mending kids’ bikes for spare change outside the parish church. Shopowner Claire Caruana says business will slow: “Customers came for the bikes but stayed for his mint tea. He was part of the furniture.”

Culturally, Malta has always blurred the line between insider and outsider. From Phoenician sailors to British servicemen, newcomers become Maltese within a generation—if the paperwork cooperates. But the EU’s Dublin Regulation and Malta’s own 2020 “Returns Strategy” have hardened that process. Deportations rose 42 % last year, aided by new memoranda with Bangladesh and Egypt that fast-track travel documents. NGOs warn the policy simply pushes migrants further underground. “When people vanish from Hamrun, landlords stop renting to Africans, bosses pay even less, and racial tensions fester,” says Aditus director Neil Falzon.

Still, Tuesday’s flight leaves practical holes. A Qormi plastering contractor, who asked not to be named, says he is already struggling to meet deadlines: “Three of my best trowellers were on that plane. Who will finish the hotel in St Julian’s now?” Meanwhile, the parish priest of Hamrun has pledged to donate the men’s abandoned tools to a new migrant support workshop, turning loss into leverage.

As the airport bus returned empty, one image lingered: Rashid’s Maltese-Arabic dictionary, dropped on the tarmac and quickly swept aside by security. Its pages—weathered by sun, sea salt and years of hoping—sum up an island that still dreams in a dozen languages yet wakes to the rustle of bureaucracy. Whether Malta can reconcile its labour needs with its enforcement zeal will determine how many more dictionaries lie unclaimed on the runway.

For now, Hamrun’s festa streamers flutter above silent scaffolding, waiting for the next pair of hands—documented or not—to raise them again.