In the small hours of Friday, lawmakers in Brussels finished an all-night fight and adopted a statute that lets officers, after a magistrate’s warrant, walk into private dwellings to detain people who lost their asylum claims, ignored leave-orders and are flagged as risks to public order or national security. The chamber counted 80 yes votes, 35 no and a dozen abstentions just after five in the morning.
Bart De Wever’s Arizona partners present the tool as a narrow way to make removal papers bite against hard cases. Staff from the immigration office must join every visit, and supporters argue the judicial gate plus the security test keep the power from becoming routine street raids.
Civil-liberties advocates reject that comfort. Amnesty International had pressed for a rejection, warning helpers who house undocumented friends could feel the chill. Mid-week, about three thousand demonstrators formed a human chain around the Palace of Justice, and more than fifty town-hall protests echoed that solidarity is not a crime.
N-VA asylum chief Anneleen Van Bossuyt called the result historic and said the aim is to stop rapists, narcotics offenders and hate preachers from sheltering behind front doors. Critics answer that ordinary criminal search powers already cover those offences and vow to haul the text before the Constitutional Court.
How often doors actually open will depend on how strictly judges read the danger clause—and how much political appetite remains once the cameras leave the hemicycle. For now Belgium has drawn a brighter line between the threshold of a home and the reach of immigration enforcement.
