A Croatian drifter who kills a train conductor. The illegal Peruvian who rapes and strangles a young woman. Moroccans, Egyptians, Nigerians and other foreigners who cause accidents, devastate, sow death. They were supposed to be repatriated, but they remain here. In the jungle of appeals
Behind a failed expulsion there is almost always a judicial appeal”, admits Antonio Nicolosi, general secretary of Unarma, a carabinieri union that has been calling for reform for some time. Because the list of expulsion orders issued and never executed is impressive. Decrees signed, notified, registered. And then left there, to rot. The numbers from the Interior Ministry offer an impressive cross-section: in 2024 there were 13,330 repatriation orders. Those executed were just over two thousand. The rest is an administrative limbo that becomes daily life. Irregularity transformed into a factual condition. Until the extreme consequences. This is where we need to start. From the system that jams. A short circuit between bureaucracy, lack of structures and judicial proceedings which today presents a very high cost in terms of collective security.
The victims of those who should not have been in Italy already fill a long list. Rome, Termini station. Red zone. Late evening on Saturday 10 January. Via Giolitti is already a Maranza garrison. A 57-year-old official from the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy leaves to go to the pharmacy. He is surrounded and beaten to death. The video surveillance cameras record everything: a group of eight people approaches and hits the man repeatedly, especially in the face, before fleeing. The victim is left on the asphalt and then transported under code red to the hospital. He ends up intubated, in intensive care, with a reserved prognosis. Fractures, traumas, injuries. He risks his life. Launch a roundup-style raid. The toll is four arrests. Among these is an 18-year-old Egyptian with a history of brawling and drugs: Mohamed Mansy Mahmoud Mohamed El Ramady, with an expulsion order in his pocket. In the courtroom, the day the precautionary custody order in prison was issued, he defended himself with these words: “I didn’t do anything and I don’t know the people who beat him.” But it was during his story that a second detail emerged: he stated that he ran away for fear of getting into trouble again, given that he had already been accompanied a couple of times to a CPR. And he left shortly after. In short, one of the suspects, beyond his responsibilities in the attempted murder of the Mimit official, had twice crossed the threshold of a repatriation center in vain.
The plastic feeling is that those decrees don’t stop anyone.
Milan. Via Paruta. Night of December 28th. Aurora Livoli, 19 years old, meets Emilio Gabriel Valdez Velazco on the Cimiano metro platform. The cameras narrate a sequence that leaves no room for interpretation. He just tried to rob another girl. He runs away, then comes back. Meet Aurora. Together they walk for more than a kilometre. They enter the courtyard on Via Paruta. The next morning Aurora is found lifeless. The autopsy is clear: asphyxia due to strangulation. Marks on the neck, lesions on the body. He tried to defend himself. Velazco confesses. He also admits sexual assault, but claims he didn’t want to kill her. He has a very heavy criminal curriculum: precedents for aggravated robbery and sexual assault. He entered Italy in 2017. On 4 August 2019 he was declared irregular. Two days later he received an expulsion order. That should be the end. But no. On the night between 6 and 7 October he reappears in Milan and is arrested for rape. Convicted, he served his sentence partly in prison and partly on probation with social services. It comes out in March 2024. Free again. Back in Italy. Irregular again. Until the epilogue.
Bologna. January 5. Alessandro Ambrosio, train conductor, is killed with a blow from behind. A single shot, which punctures a lung. The alleged murderer is a Croatian: Marin Jelenic, 36 years old. Homeless, previous convictions for illegal possession of weapons and assaults on railway staff. On 23 December the prefect of Milan had signed an order for him to be removed from Italy: ten days to leave the country. When he was stopped in Desenzano del Garda, Jelenic had two knives on him and, according to investigators, was about to flee to Austria, having already purchased a train ticket to Villach. Too late this time too.
On December 19, a car hits a motorcycle and goes straight ahead. The patrol follows her and stops her shortly after. Driving is a man without a licence, who hands over a passport and tests positive for alcohol, with a blood alcohol level above the limits. While the officers carried out the checks, he ran away on foot, but left the document on the spot. The next day the agents arrive at his address. The man is taken to command for identification. It is there that the story comes together again: he was the recipient of an expulsion decree.
The story inevitably brought back memories of another sensational case. A case that reminds everyone that the short circuit has been feeding for years. July 2008, Rome, a stolen van goes through all the red lights. The police intercept him. At the crossroads between via Nomentana and viale Regina Margherita he overwhelms a Citroën C3. Rocco Trivigno, 20 years old, dies. University student. The driver of the van is Ignatiuc Vasile, a Moldovan citizen. The vehicle was found to be stolen. The driver was the recipient of an expulsion order. Previous records for fighting and receiving stolen goods. Arrested for voluntary manslaughter with possible malice. After a tortuous judicial process he was sentenced to 15 years.
From then to now the music has not changed. Scordia, province of Catania. April 2025. A thirty-seven year old North African is stopped by the police for attempted murder. At the height of an argument he stabs a fellow countryman in the abdomen who ends up urgently in the operating room at Lentini hospital. The reconstruction speaks of a provocation in a recreational club, insults, a glass bottle smashed in the forehead and then the knife taken out of his pocket. Another thing emerges from the investigations: the thirty-seven-year-old used two false identities, was illegal on the national territory and had been the recipient of an expulsion order since March 2018.
Corigliano, in the Cosentino area. On February 25, a 29-year-old Moroccan of no fixed abode was arrested for the murder of Mohamed Sibaa, 22, who was stabbed to death. The young man was found dying in a house in a working class neighbourhood, shot in the abdomen, and died a few hours later in hospital. The investigations traced the crime back to a dispute that took place in a context of strong social unease, linked to the division of the stolen goods from a small theft. The alleged killer, illegal, was already the recipient of an expulsion decree. The cases are multiplying. Venice: a couple responsible for split thefts. He had passed through the Potenza CPR, accompanied there with an expulsion order from the national territory.
Campobasso: an abandoned building set on fire by a Nigerian citizen already the recipient of an expulsion order.
Bergamo: an irregular Moroccan, expelled in 2023, is found with cocaine, money and jewels.
And the news is full of cases like this. As are the areas most at risk: the stations and the outskirts of large centres. While waiting for the approval of the new legislative measures on security implemented by the government, the Minister of the Interior Matteo Piantedosi, to stem the short circuit, has issued a circular. The indication is clear: «Limit expulsions with expulsion orders as much as possible». Anyone who receives an expulsion order “must be kept in CPR awaiting repatriation”. Judges permitting. Because, Nicolosi recalls, often, judicial appeal “becomes a mechanism that exploits the folds of the law to obtain infinite delays, transforming an already foreseen decision into a labyrinth of uncertainties”.
The paradox, for Unarma, is this: «What should represent a simple administrative act becomes a long and useless legal drama, to the detriment of the certainty of the rules». A difficult concept to explain to the victims of those not expelled.
