Two human rights lawyers have dismissed a well-publicised police raid on undocumented migrants living in Marsa on Thursday as unnecessarily heavyhanded and intended to intimidate.

The extent of the raid was a show of force to make them feel unsafe and does nothing to tackle the real problems of migration, Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) director and lawyer Katrine Camilleri said.

Human rights lawyer Therese Comodini Cachia explained that while the law grants police the right to forcibly enter into private property in exceptional cases it raised concerns over how proportionate the Marsa operation was to the circumstances.

“Criteria such as reasonable suspicion and use of force proportionate to the circumstances being investigated are two basic criteria which limit the use of force by the police,” Comodini Cachia said.

“Did the information and evidence already known to the police justify this type of operation and this type of police action which seems to have targeted an area frequented by migrants?”

A considerable number of police officers raided a block of apartments in Marsa and arrested 49 people. Four people were arrested for drugs.

Police kicked down most of the block’s front doors and one door was pried open so forcefully that the entire frame was ripped off the wall.

As a result, some residents cannot lock their apartments and have no choice but to put tables and chairs up against the doors for security. On Friday, residents of the building who were searched but not arrested told Times of Malta that the raid was too heavy-handed.

Law-abiding migrants said they were now unable to leave their home over concerns for their privacy and security.

But on Saturday, sources close to the police defended the operation, saying the block housed very few legal migrants, and the rest were all living in Malta illegally.

“In the entire block, only two or three were living in Malta legally,” one source said.

“Behind those knocked-down doors that can be seen [on Times of Malta] we found people living in Malta illegally.”

The sources said the police had no option but to force themselves into the apartments after they repeatedly knocked and identified themselves and the residents failed to open the door.

“There is no option but to force entry, because you have to appreciate that they might not be opening the door to try to escape from shafts and other outlets,” one source said.

Times of Malta asked the sources whether the police intend to fix the damage caused for those who were living there legally, but we were told to send an e-mail to the police headquarters.

Katrine Camilleri believes it was all part of a show of force by the government to intimidate migrants and make them feel unsafe.

“Why don’t we see the government demolishing so many other illegal structures all around the country? Why was it this one, that happened to be in a migrant populated area?” she asked.

“This is a case of being strong, bordering on brutal, with the weak and weak with the strong.”

An apartment door was prised open along with its frame.

Camilleri said this bullying tactic with migrants does nothing to tackle the real issues with migration and integration.

On the contrary, it only serves to make outcasts out of vulnerable people and heighten tensions between migrants and the Maltese. Comodini Cachia agrees.

“In a country where the debate on migration is generally couched in fear of ‘us and them’, several prejudices and elements of racism, the manner in which this type of operation was announced and the involvement of the minister rubberstamps already ingrained prejudices towards persons with different ethnic backgrounds,” she said.

Katrine Camilleri.

“The use of machinery to drop what may have been considered by the police to be an illegal structure smacks heavily of action having been taken abusively and discriminately.”

She was referring to a police operation which continued on Friday evening, when a structure acting as an entrance to the Tiger Bar near the Marsa open centre was destroyed by a mechanical shovel.

In a Facebook post, Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri later described it as an irregular migration raid accompanied by an anti-drug and organised crime operation.

But Comodini Cachia asked why the minister, who frequently claims he never gets involved in police operations, decided to announce the raid himself.

“Having a minister, rather than the police commissioner or the police public relations officer, making the raid public while it was taking place raises questions on whether this was a politically sanctioned operation,” she said.

“To what extent was the minister involved in the preparation of this operation and was his approval for the operation sought?” queried Comodini Cachia, a former Nationalist MP.

Therese Comodini Cachia.

She also asked how the operation distinguished between those who were rounded up for reasonable suspicion and those who were caught in the midst of the operation.

“How did the operation protect those with no suspicion of criminal activity?” she asked. “Was this raid in response to the criminal activity that has already taken place in the area or was it to target criminal activity that the police have knowledge is taking place in the area?”

During a radio interview on Saturday, the minister commended the “excellent operation” that officers undertook in heavy rain on Thursday.

Asked whether charges will also be pressed against the migrants’ landlord for renting the property out to undocumented people, Camilleri said he agrees that such perpetrators should also be prosecuted.