Some 700 asylum seekers sleep outside Ter Apel as employees buckle under workload

About 700 asylum seekers slept outside the asylum registration center in Ter Apel on Tuesday night, NU.nl reports. That is significantly more than the previous nights when nearly 400 people spent the night outside. Sources told RTV Noord that some employees at the center stopped working on Tuesday afternoon in protest against the high workload.

The registration center in Ter Apel is the first place asylum seekers go to in the Netherlands. The Ter Apel reception center can handle a maximum of about 2,000 asylum seekers, according to the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA).

The center has been overcrowded for months, with asylum seekers regularly ending up sleeping outside because there was no room for them inside. Some also decided to sleep outside rather than go to an emergency shelter elsewhere in the country for fear of losing their chance to file their application.

According to RTV Noord’s sources, a group of COA employees decided to stop working at 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday out of dissatisfaction with the working conditions. These are employees from the department who receive asylum seekers in the first step of the process, the sources said.

COA spokesperson Jacqueline Engbers denied to the broadcasters that there was a strike, though she acknowledged that COA employees in Ter Apel are struggling with the workload. “When you go to work in the morning and see people sleeping outside the gate, it hurts your COA heart. We stand for the reception and guidance of asylum seekers, not for locking them out.”

The flow of asylum seekers in the Netherlands has come to a standstill. The main issue is that no housing is available for refugees - asylum seekers who got residency permits in the Netherlands. So they are stuck staying in asylum shelters, which means that new asylum seekers can’t move out of Ter Apel to regular asylum centers.

Ter Apel is currently the only asylum registration center in the Netherlands. It was initially set up in 1996 at a site used by NATO up until the organization left the area a year earlier.

The government is working on opening a second and third registration center in the country.