Police fired stun grenades and rubber bullets at Malawian nationals at Sherwood Hall in Durban on Wednesday after men at the transit site refused to be moved to the Lindela Repatriation Centre in Gauteng.

The men had come to Sherwood Hall to be repatriated to Malawi. When authorities told them they would be loaded into vans bound for Lindela instead of buses going home, they refused. The crowd, carrying rocks, sticks and tree branches, pelted police with stones and bottles.

"We have been told to go to Malawi," one man said. "Why are they not taking us to Malawi now? They are putting us inside vans instead of putting us in buses."

The government says the move is necessary for two reasons. Sherwood Hall has swelled to more than 10,000 people and is beyond capacity. Authorities are also prioritising women and children for direct repatriation buses, while men facing formal deportation proceedings are being transferred to Lindela, which has the court infrastructure to process their cases.

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The Department of Home Affairs found that at least 1,876 of the people at the site are undocumented or in violation of immigration law. A virtual priority court has been set up to fast-track those cases.

The men say they do not want to go to a detention facility. They want to go home.

KwaZulu-Natal MEC Siboniso Duma Ntuli said the province has mobilised an emergency response to manage the growing crisis at the site.

The Malawian government is still appealing for donations to fund the broader repatriation operation.