Although the sample was small, these findings coincide to a large degree with the findings of a larger refugee report released in November 2003. additional anecdotal evidence supports the survey findings that some Zimbabweans have problems accessing health services, including torture victims. 5. Deportation Around 45,000 Zimbabweans a year are deported. Deportees are held at Lindela detention centre and are then deported on a once-weekly or fortnightly train. Deporting Zimbabweans costs South Africa approximately R 720,000,000 a year. Most deportees are back in South Africa within a few hours or days of deportation. Police and Home Affairs are not issuing 15 day permits to people picked up without papers, who ask at that point for asylum, and is rather going ahead and deporting them. This is illegal. People are being deported without ever seeing an immigration officer and having the chance to claim refuge. Considering how hard it is to get an ASP, this puts political exiles at risk of deportation. Corruption is a problem. Police commonly bribe Zimbabweans R200 in order not to send them for deportation. Home Affairs officials charge R800 to release people from Lindela before deportation. People who are very ill are also being picked up, held in Lindela and deported. This is in contravention of Lindela’s stated policy and basic humanitarian law, yet in one week in October this year, 11 deportees died in Lindela. Others have died on the deportation train, or soon after arrival back in Beitbridge. In Musina, there is no RRO, and all Zimbabweans are deported without the opportunity to claim ASPs. Police do not have the resources to cope with the numbers of detainees and are holding them in poor conditions. They report deporting the same people three times in one week. In the opinion of the police in Musina, this cycle of deportations is not constructive. Unaccompanied minors have been regularly deported and this is illegal. There was a test case ruling in September of this year confirming this, and saying foreign children have the same rights as South African children in terms of the Child Care Act. From time to time, parents get deported without their children, who remain in South Africa until the parents come back. 6. Back in Zimbabwe: the deportees on arrival Police in Beitbridge do not have the capacity to hold detainees, and so release them within minutes of repatriation. The authors witnessed that within an hour of being dismissed by the police, most deportees are on their way back in the direction of the border, by taxi or on foot. 7. Problems of the repatriated in Beitbridge While most deportees head south again, some end up stranded without money or too ill to continue their journey. Neither the police nor NGOs here provide bus passes or any other support for deportees. Deportees reportedly die on a weekly basis in Beitbridge hospital. We were shown orphans whose mothers had died in this hospital, leaving small children stranded far away from families. Human remains washed up on the banks of the Limpopo also end up in mass paupers’ graves here. Human remains, which are assumed to be of border jumpers, are picked up fairly regularly in the bush around the border area. 12