They arrive in white vans, wearing T-shirts with "immigration" across the chest, keeping handcuffs ready in their pockets.
Sharon scrolls through these images on her smartphone, glancing nervously around Habima Square in Tel Aviv. This upscale area is usually far from migrant-populated neighbourhoods, offering a fleeting sense of safety from police patrols.
Both Sharon and Beth arrived in Israel over two decades ago as caregivers, yet they share a chilling reality: "Every single day here could be our last," the two women say.
As national regulations confirm, specifically the Foreign Workers Law of 1991 and the Entry into Israel Law of 1952, the Israeli legislative framework subjects migrant workers to profound structural precarity. Standard work visas are valid for a maximum of five years and are strictly non-renewable.
Consequently, thousands choose to remain in the country undocumented, living under the constant threat of the immigration police.
According to official data presented to a Knesset Special Committee by the Population and Immigration Authority, out of a shadow workforce of over 33,000 undocumented individuals, operating alongside 195,000 legal workers, authorities forcibly deported 467 people in 2024 alone.
These are not merely administrative numbers, but the tangible outcome of targeted raids that criminalise vulnerable individuals. Furthermore, this precarity is rapidly expanding: according to the latest Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) data released in September 2026, the total number of foreign citizens in Israel has surged to a record 304,000.
As the state continues to import foreign labour while maintaining its rigid visa expirations, an ever-growing number of migrants is destined to fall into irregularity, exposing a massive community to the continuous threat of arrest and deportation.
Shira, Director of Public Policy at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants in Israel, an NGO providing legal aid to detainees, illustrates the sheer scale of the current crisis.
"Before October 7, 2023, there were about 100,000 legal migrant workers in Israel, primarily in agriculture, construction, and caregiving, arriving through strict bilateral agreements with countries like Thailand, the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, and China," Shira explains to The New Arab.
Before its genocide, the Israeli economy also relied heavily on a workforce of approximately 150,000 Palestinian commuters from the occupied West Bank and about 17,000 from Gaza.
However, in the immediate wake of the October 7 attacks, the Israeli government swiftly revoked their work permits and sealed the checkpoints, citing security concerns.
To avert a total collapse of the construction, agricultural, and industrial sectors, the state launched an aggressive, fast-tracked campaign to import foreign labour, effectively attempting to replace the Palestinian workforce overnight.
"They stopped relying on bilateral agreements," Shira notes regarding this post-October 7 shift, "by bypassing these regulated, state-to-state frameworks, the government opened the floodgates to private recruitment agencies.
"This deregulated influx has pushed the foreign worker population to nearly 250,000. For the first time, these new migrants, primarily from India, Sri Lanka, and Malawi, are being deployed in unprecedented sectors, such as supermarkets, exposing new arrivals to severe exploitation," Shira adds.
'She is an alien here'
Many workers incur crippling debts in their home countries to pay placement agencies, only to arrive in Israel tethered to binding visas.
Some of the migrants interviewed told us they paid between $10,000 and $15,000 to private agencies just to reach the country.
The Ministry of Interior procedures dictate that a worker's visa is legally tied to a specific employer; if a worker resigns due to unpaid wages or abuse, they immediately forfeit their legal status.
Desperate to survive, many turn to fraudulent schemes, filing false asylum requests just to obtain temporary work visas. These claims are inevitably fast-tracked and rejected, placing the workers in immediate jeopardy of arrest.
However, in April 2025, a report presented to the Knesset's Special Committee on Foreign Workers highlighted the government's economic framing of the issue.
As the report showed in 2024, a total of 467 undocumented workers were removed from Israel, and about 4,000 people left Israel as part of a voluntary exit program, mostly Eritrean nationals.
Meanwhile, the detention machinery remains implacable: undocumented individuals are held in criminal facilities, such as the Givon prison in Ramle, which features a specific wing for immigration detention.
"If they are held for more than 24 hours, they need to see an adjudicator at a tribunal inside the detention," Shira explains.
The state's control extends brutally into migrants' private lives. Caregivers are forced upon entry to sign a document pledging not to engage in romantic relationships in Israel, as the migrant caregivers told The New Arab.
"If you get pregnant, you will be deported unless you send your children back to your country," Beth testifies.
Yet, because caregivers often stay legally for a decade or more, building a life becomes inevitable.
"After seven years here, my daughter was born. I had planned to send her away, but the moment I held her in my arms, I couldn't do it," Beth says, "now she lives here where she was born, but she has no documents. She is an alien here."
When papers decide your future
While new arrivals face immediate exploitation, those trapped in the system for decades endure a gruelling psychological attrition.
Joffrey, a Nigerian refugee, has lived in Israel for 19 years without obtaining permanent status for his children.
"I came from Nigeria just as a refugee," he says. Over nearly two decades, he has built a life here, raising twin daughters who will soon turn 18. Yet, their future is entirely paralysed by the state's bureaucracy.
"We are fighting for it, to get papers," Joffrey explains, noting that without documentation, his daughters, born and raised in Israel, remain institutional ghosts, unable to access higher education, obtain driver's licenses, or travel.
Similarly, Ikenne, who arrived from Nigeria in 2017 after fleeing political persecution as a member of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), highlights the stark dichotomy of living in Israel, stating that the structural exclusion in Israel is absolute.
He points out that the lack of a clear pathway to residency leaves them perpetually vulnerable, emphasising that if the government could simply "make documents easier," the migrants could finally emerge from the shadows and contribute fully to society.
Esther, a 58-year-old woman from Ghana, has lived in Israel for 35 years. Her early years were marked by the same agony faced by undocumented mothers today. "I sent back the first two children to Ghana. It was not easy, but I had no choice," she recalls, having been forced to separate from her infants to ensure they had a future.
Today, even with a passport, Esther holds no illusions about her place in Israeli society. She actively warns younger migrants about the reality of their existence, instructing them to remember their African heritage.
"No matter how you were born here and everything, in a way, you will not be accepted. You have to know your roots,” she told The New Arab. "There will be a time when our children want to fit into something, then they will tell them: 'Listen, you are not from here. You were just born here.' So psychologically, you have to prepare the children. Despite the fact that they are born here, they have to know their roots."
No safe place
For those raising undocumented children today, daily life is characterised by paranoia.
"When we go grocery shopping, we have to constantly look around," says Sharon. In 2019, the immigration police raided her home because of her outspoken advocacy for migrants' rights. "I knew it would happen. I had to hide for six months, moving from one house to another. The oldest of my daughters was only 12," she recalls.
Paradoxically, the outbreak of the Israel-US war on Iran brought a temporary halt to the raids. "It's awful to say, but some mothers are happy when there is a war because the immigration police stop. We could finally sleep, even if in bomb shelters," the women confess.
However, hours after a recent ceasefire announcement with Iran, the crackdown resumed with unprecedented ferocity. Authorities rely on racial profiling, and ordinary citizens frequently volunteer to report suspicious individuals.
Deportations have become swift and ruthless, bypassing standard legal recourse. As Beth and Sharon told The New Arab, four mothers they knew were deported recently, leaving their newly adult children behind in Israel.
"One has cancer and was deported last June, another has a severely autistic son who was left alone during the war with Iran," Beth states.
"They used to give advance notice, giving you time to call a lawyer and leave the country. Now, they have initiated a new policy: everything is immediate," Father David Mark Neuhaus, who in 2010 initiated coordinated efforts for migrants within the St. James Vicariate, denounces.
"A few weeks ago, in our community in Rehovot, they raided an apartment at three in the morning where a man, his wife, and their six-year-old child (who was born here) were staying. They took them, put them in prison, and within 24 hours, loaded them onto a plane to the Philippines," the priest recounts.
For the hundreds of thousands of workers sustaining an occupying country's economy, whether replacing Palestinians or caring for the elderly, the illusion of a democratic haven is shattered.
"I don't understand," Beth asks herself, "how a so-called 'democratic' country can hire workers and, after using them, not know what to do with them."
Lidia Ginestra Giuffrida is a Sicilian freelance journalist focusing on human rights, migration, and conflict. She has reported extensively from across war zones, including Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Ukraine. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera and New Lines Magazine, and she is a regular contributor to Italian outlets
Follow her on Instagram: @lidia_ginestra_giuffrida