Pakistan sets November 1 deadline for illegal immigrants to leave country

Pakistan's caretaker government has set November 1 as the deadline for thousands of illegal immigrants to leave the country or face deportation as the government intensified its crackdown against those involved in militancy and smuggling, Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a press briefing after a high-level meeting of the Apex Committee chaired by caretaker Prime Minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar and attended by Army Chief General Asim Munir among others, Bugti said that soon law enforcement agencies will get directions against the illegal immigrants.

He said that the meeting held at the PM House took the decision to remove illegal residents under the National Action Plan which was devised in 2015 to deal with the threat of militancy.

"The first decision taken is about our illegal immigrants who are living in Pakistan through illegal means. We have given them a deadline of November 1 to willingly return to their countries and if they don't, all law enforcement agencies (LEAs) of the state and provinces will deport them, Bugti said.

He said that the meeting decided that the welfare and security of a Pakistani was the most important for the government and all stakeholders were taken in the loop regarding the decision to expel those living illegally.

He said an operation would be launched after November 1 by a task force already created in the interior ministry against the illegal properties and businesses owned by illegal immigrants or that were being run in collaboration with Pakistanis.

The minister said that no one would be allowed to enter Pakistan without a passport or visa after November 1 and anyone entering with valid documents would be deported. He said those having illegal national identity cards would also be targeted.

He said DNA testing would also be used to identify those having Pakistan's identity cardholders despite not being Pakistani citizens.

According to Bugti, currently, 1.73 million unregistered illegal Afghans are living in Pakistan.

Another around 1.3 million Afghans are registered refugees and another 880,000 have legal status to remain in Pakistan, according to the United Nations data.

The development followed after the government launched a crackdown against illegal Afghan refugees as part of efforts to curb smuggling from Pakistan to Afghanistan.

So far more than 700 Afghans have been arrested since early September in Karachi alone and hundreds more in other cities.

The action was also prompted by a spate of terrorist attacks in recent months involving Afghan nationals. Bugti in his remarks said that 14 out of 24 suicide attacks since January were carried out by Afghan nationals.