In easier times for Egypt’s refugees, Azza Mostafa, a pro-government TV anchor, had nothing but generous words for the many thousands of Syrians who had built new lives in Egypt after their own country imploded into civil war in 2011.

“I’d like to say to our Syrian families and our brothers in Egypt,” she said in a 2019 broadcast, “you’ve truly brought light to Egypt.”

But there she was on her show in June, fulminating against Egypt’s growing number of outsiders — an echo of the country’s leaders, whose policy toward refugees and migrants has hardened as they wrestle with an economic crisis made worse by wars in neighboring Gaza, Sudan and Libya.

“This has become unbearable,” Ms. Mostafa said, accusing migrants of driving up rents and promoting female genital mutilation. “There are many acts of overstepping bounds. Is that acceptable? After we opened our country for them?”

Egypt long made it easy for foreigners of all kinds to live and work in the country, largely without interference, whether they were refugees, migrant workers or Westerners escaping coronavirus lockdowns.

The past 13 years have brought a near unbroken stream of newcomers fleeing conflict to the country that is known among Arabs as the “mother of the world.” That includes not just Syrians but also Sudanese, Yemenis, Eritreans and, most recently, Palestinians from Gaza.

Egypt’s lax immigration rules meant many never formally registered as refugees or received official permission to stay long-term, yet managed to stitch themselves almost seamlessly into the country, supporting themselves and sometimes starting businesses.

Since Sudan’s civil war drove a surge of refugees to Egypt starting in 2023, however, the impoverished government in Cairo has complained louder and louder about the burden of foreigners. It rapidly tightened its policies — hoping, analysts and diplomats say, to win more support from international backers eager to prevent migration to their own countries.

Egypt says it spends $10 billion each year on its nine million refugees, according to officials and government-controlled media (though experts say both numbers are greatly exaggerated), all while Egyptians endure soaring prices and subsidy cuts.

Years of government overspending, reliance on imports and policies that neglected private-sector growth left the country’s finances in precarious shape before the wars in Ukraine and Gaza sent them crashing. Egypt lost $7 billion in crucial revenue from the Suez Canal in 2024 as the conflict in Gaza has squeezed shipping in the Red Sea, according to government officials.

With Egypt deep in debt and hard-pressed to pay for imports such as wheat and energy, the currency has crashed, while some goods have become difficult to find.

Ahmed Abu Al-Yazid, the head of a government-owned sugar firm, the Delta Sugar Company, blamed refugees for a sugar shortage that experts link to the economic crisis. The president accused them of draining Egypt’s precious water. On social media, pro-government accounts — some of which appeared to be fake — accused Sudanese refugees of driving up rents and promoting female genital mutilation.

A crackdown soon followed the accusations, according to migrants, refugees and their advocates.

Sudanese refugees have been rounded up in police sweeps, detained and summarily deported. Syrians who have lived in Egypt for years have been told to pay thousands of dollars to stay. Many remain hesitant to return, despite the fall of the Assad regime in December, until the situation stabilizes.

Foreign workers from Asia and from other parts of Africa now face extra hurdles to keep their legal status, and in some cases, have been arrested to compel them to pay high fees, advocates say.

Last month, Egypt passed a law that would hand responsibility for screening refugees and others to the government, instead of to the United Nations refugee agency.

Government officials said the measure would ensure a wide array of refugee rights. Critics of the move, however, said that it would become far harder for refugees to gain protection or access to health care and schools. The law also empowers the government to revoke refugee status on vague grounds such as breaches of national security, political activity or violations of Egyptian social customs.

Abu Saleh, 32, a Syrian who works in a small Cairo grocery, said he had lived in the city for 13 years “without a single issue” until he discovered in July that he could no longer enroll his son in school without a residence permit.

Just to renew his family’s tourist visas, he said, he was told that he would have to return to Syria and pay $2,000 per person in fees — a process he would have to repeat every six months.

“Egypt has been there for us all along,” said Abu Saleh, who asked to be identified by the name he uses around town to avoid possible repercussions. “I’d like to appeal to the government of Egypt: Give us residence, even if it’s a little more expensive. We’re facing tough conditions.”

Egypt has not explained its hardening attitude toward foreigners. But analysts and migrant advocates tie it to the economic crisis, which has generated widespread bitterness and undermined President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s rule.

The newcomers make convenient scapegoats for Egyptians’ hardships, rights groups say. Immigration fees, charged in dollars, can supply some of the foreign currency that Egypt badly needs. And foreigners are also valuable pawns in Egypt’s quest for more financial support from its international partners, rights groups say.

“They think, ‘How can these people be useful for the government?’” said Nour Khalil, executive director of the Refugees Platform in Egypt, which advocates for migrants’ rights.

The U.N. refugee agency counts about 818,000 registered refugees in Egypt, who are entitled to free public health care and education. There are likely many more unregistered refugees, though analysts and aid workers dispute the figure reaches nine million.

The benefits that registered refugees receive mean that Egypt “is treating them like Egyptians, despite the fact that we are not a rich country,” the foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, said at a news conference last month. “There is no country in the world assuming these responsibilities and challenges like here in Egypt. We don’t have one single refugee camp — they are fully integrated in society.”

Refugee advocates agree that Egypt needs more resources. Unlike other countries in the region, including Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, where the United States, the United Nations and the European Union have poured billions into supporting refugees, Egypt has not received significant funds to help house Syrian or other refugees.

That is changing.

As the war in Gaza has pounded Egypt’s finances, Western backers have rushed to Egypt’s aid, anxious to prevent an economic collapse in the Arab world’s most populous country, analysts and diplomats say. A crash in Egypt could further destabilize the Middle East and send a deluge of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, where there is heavy public pressure to restrict migration.

The European Union pledged a fast-tracked $8 billion aid package to Egypt in March, echoing deals the bloc has struck with Mauritania, Tunisia and Turkey that funded migration enforcement in those countries.

Other backers, including the International Monetary Fund, have sent billions more to stabilize Egypt’s economy.

Critics say the European pact with Egypt, like the bloc’s other migration deals, is enabling rights abuses by rewarding Mr. el-Sisi’s authoritarianism and potentially funding the current crackdown on migrants.

Groups including Amnesty International and the Refugees Platform in Egypt have documented what they say is a pattern of mass arbitrary arrests and unlawful deportations of Sudanese refugees — some detained as they were smuggled across the border, others rounded up during random sweeps of predominantly Sudanese neighborhoods.

Some Syrians, too, have been expelled, Mr. Khalil of the refugees platform said. His group has also documented more than 50 arrests of foreign workers, some of whom already had residency, who were held until they paid $1,000 in fees and fines, he said.

An atmosphere of fear has brought throngs of Sudanese to the doorstep of the U.N. refugee agency in Cairo, seeking formal protection. But refugee status can take months, if not years, to obtain: Appointments to begin the process are not available until late 2025. And some of the Sudanese who have been detained and deported, Mr. Khalil said, held some form of U.N. identification, casting doubt on whether the organization could guarantee security.

Among those waiting outside one morning was Mohammed Abdelwahab, 36. By the time he and his family tried to cross the border from Sudan this spring, Egypt had tightly restricted what had been free-flowing movement between the two countries, so they resorted to smugglers instead.

Without legal papers, Mr. Abdelwahab and his 14-year-old son, Mohanad, collected plastic bottles on Cairo’s streets for a living. Mr. Abdelwahab was looking for better work one day in June when Mohanad disappeared.

Twenty days later, Mohanad resurfaced with a WhatsApp message: He had been rounded up with a group of other Sudanese and deported.

Mr. Abdelwahab had been looking for Mohanad in another city. When he returned to Cairo, his wife and three other children had been evicted for nonpayment.

“It’s indescribable,” he said. “Now they’re all camping out here,” he added, referring to his family and indicating the sidewalk in front of the refugee agency, where groups of other Sudanese waited listlessly in the sun.

Emad Mekay and Rania Khaled contributed reporting.

For years, France’s main far-right party tried to distance itself from the long trail of inflammatory and derogatory comments made by Jean-Marie Le Pen, its founding president.

His daughter, who took the party reins in 2011, kicked him out. It changed its name, from National Front to National Rally. And the party — long run by Mr. Le Pen, who called Hitler’s gas chambers “a detail” of history — has made a point of decrying antisemitism.

But when Mr. Le Pen died on Tuesday at 96, the party nuzzled him deeply in its fold, its leaders celebrating him as a visionary, an “immense patriot” and a “courageous and talented politician.”

“He will remain the one who, in the storms, held in his hands the small flickering flame of the French Nation,” the National Rally said in a statement, adding that his “will and unwavering tenacity” had shaped the party into an “autonomous, powerful and free” force.

There was nothing in the statement to indicate disagreement with Mr. Le Pen’s views or his caustic remarks. At most, it said he had been “unruly and sometimes turbulent,” often fond of controversy.

Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, said that the strategy of Marine Le Pen, Mr. Le Pen’s daughter and successor, “was always to set herself apart without taking full stock” of her father’s unsavory legacy. It was too early to tell whether she might yet do so now, he said.

“A venerable age had taken the warrior but given us back our father,” Ms. Le Pen, who is no longer party president but still a top lawmaker and leading force in the party, said in a short tribute on Wednesday. “Death has taken him back.”

So far, the party does not appear to be headed down a path of deep introspection. Instead, Mr. Camus said, it seems to be trying to “re-inject” a new version of Mr. Le Pen into France’s collective memory, safe in the knowledge that there will be no more racist or antisemitic outbursts from him.

But Renaud Labaye, the National Rally’s general secretary in the lower house of Parliament, said the party had already weighed in on Mr. Le Pen’s past.

“It was precisely his expulsion — an act made all the stronger by the fact that it was initiated by his daughter and that he was the party’s founder — that underlined the fact that his excesses and reprehensible positions were firmly condemned by the party,” Mr. Labaye said.

For decades, Mr. Le Pen was a pariah of French politics, considered so odious that many opponents refused to debate him. That had much to do with the party’s history: Its founders in 1972 included former Nazi soldiers, collaborators with the wartime Vichy regime and onetime members of a group that carried out deadly attacks meant to thwart Algeria’s struggle to free itself from French colonial rule.

Mr. Le Pen’s openly racist, antisemitic and anti-gay comments cemented the public’s perception of the party.

Mr. Le Pen, who was in paratrooper units in two colonial wars to suppress the independence movements in Vietnam and Algeria, once said that races “do not have the same abilities, nor the same level of historical evolution,” and he was repeatedly convicted of making antisemitic comments and publicly downplaying the Holocaust. He once compared homosexuality to pedophilia.

In 2002, after Mr. Le Pen surprised many by making it to the second round of the presidential election, left-wing parties called on their members to vote for his conservative opponent, Jacques Chirac. This was the most famous use of a strategy known in French politics as a “republican front,” which has since been used multiple times to stop the far right from taking power.

In that 2002 election, Mr. Le Pen won less than 18 percent of the vote. But when his daughter took over, she began what became known as an “undemonization” strategy, to cleanse the party’s image and broaden its appeal.

She distanced herself from her father’s antisemitic statements, declaring concentration camps “the height of barbarity.” She ousted her father from the party in 2015, when he was its honorary president, and said his repeated Holocaust denial showed that “his goal is to cause harm” to the party. Three years later, she renamed it.

Now the National Rally — after riding successive waves of fear and anger over unchecked immigration, rising inflation and deadly terrorism — is no longer on the fringes of French politics, with some of its policies more widely accepted.

Last summer, during a snap election, another republican front between left-wing and centrist parties prevented a far-right victory. Still, a record 124 National Rally lawmakers now sit in the powerful lower house of Parliament, making it the largest single opposition party.

Though Ms. Le Pen has softened some of the party’s initial hard-line stances, its bedrock focus on identity and its eagerness to change the French Constitution to restrict the rights of foreigners mark it in France as a far-right party, according to experts. Party members argue, for instance, that French people should have priority over even legal migrants in areas like certain social benefits and subsidized housing. That runs counter to the French constitution and Republican ideals, set during the revolution of 1789, which make all people equal, Mr. Camus said.

Many experts have characterized Ms. Le Pen’s “undemonization” campaign as mere marketing, and in the election last summer, many National Rally candidates were castigated for past racist or antisemitic remarks.

Some analysts said the party had no choice but to recognize Mr. Le Pen’s integral role in building its long-lasting, stable and successful movement, which is still dominated by his family.

But the party’s glowing remembrance of Mr. Le Pen was also a way to recast his image — and its own, some experts said.

“Paying tribute to Le Pen ‘undemonizes’ the party even further” by portraying him as an excessive but prescient politician, unfairly condemned for warning about the dangers of immigration, said Nicolas Lebourg, a historian who specializes in the far right.

“People who voted for the first time last year have almost no memory of him,” Mr. Lebourg said.

The tributes, from the party and others, are also evidence that Mr. Le Pen’s ideas — like drastically stemming immigration — are increasingly part of the mainstream.

“The importance that Jean-Marie Le Pen has had in our political life is the consequence of long years of denial and powerlessness on the migration issue,” wrote François-Xavier Bellamy, the leader in the European Parliament of the mainstream conservative Republican party, which historically despised Mr. Le Pen and was thrown into turmoil last year when its then-leader advocated an alliance with the National Rally.

“Those who insult him even in death refuse to first look at their failures,” Mr. Bellamy said.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2018, Mr. Le Pen assessed his own influence: “My ideas have made progress, even in the programs of my opponents,” he said. “That’s why my struggle was not without value.”

Even in death, however, he retains many political enemies, especially on the left. Crowds of hundreds gathered in several cities across France to celebrate his death Tuesday night.

“No, he was not a ‘great servant of France,’” wrote Manuel Bompard, national coordinator for the far-left party France Unbowed. “He was an enemy of the Republic.”

And Mélanie Vogel, a Green party senator, said on X: “His ideas, the danger they represent for our democracies are very much alive. Let us finally defeat his heirs.”

Mr. Le Pen’s long life and political career encompassed the sweep of postwar French history. Even the Élysée Palace, home and office of the French president, who has fought to keep the far right out of power, acknowledged as much, noting in a statement Mr. Le Pen’s five runs for president, his seven terms as a lawmaker in the European Parliament and his roles as a municipal and regional councilor.

“A historic figure of the extreme right,” the statement said, “he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.

A South Korean marine colonel who faced insubordination and defamation charges after accusing President Yoon Suk Yeol of whitewashing his investigation into a marine’s death was acquitted by a court-martial on Thursday.

A public uproar over the case of Col. Park Jung-hun rocked South Korea for months last year, prompting opposition lawmakers to put forward a bill to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his allegations. The political confrontation intensified ​as Mr. Yoon vetoed the bill three times and the opposition threatened to impeach him.

Mr. Yoon eventually was impeached by the opposition-dominated National Assembly, but for another reason: his six-hour imposition of martial law last month, during which he was accused of sending troops into the Assembly, which he said had tried to paralyze his government​. He was also accused of ordering the arrests of his political enemies.

Months before that, the opposition had cited the prosecution of Colonel Park as a​n example of how Mr. Yoon’s government abused its ​authority to silence ​dissenting voices.

In its ruling on Thursday, a three-judge panel at the Central District Military Court in Seoul cleared ​Colonel Park of insubordination and defaming senior military officers. He had denied the charges, saying they were filed in retaliation for ​his efforts to hold senior officers in the South Korean Marine Corps accountable for the death of ​Lance Cpl. Chae Su-geun in July 2023.

Lance Corporal Chae and other marines had been sent to search for missing residents in central Seoul after the town was hit by floods, but they were given no life jackets ​and ordered to wear knee-high rubber boots that impeded their movement as they waded through the fast-moving, waist-deep floodwaters. Lance Corporal Chae was swept away and later found dead.

Colonel Park, who led an investigation into the incident, concluded that eight superior officers, including Maj. Gen. Im Seong-geun, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, had been responsible for Lance Corporal Chae’s death through negligence.​

He later accused the Defense Ministry of whitewashing ​his inquiry and absolving top military brass of responsibility. He blamed Mr. Yoon, who he said “flew into a rage” after being told that his report held senior commanders responsible for the death. Colonel Park cited the Marine’s top commander as his source ​for his knowledge of Mr. Yoon’s outburst, but the commander denied making such a statement.

Colonel Park ​said he resisted pressure from the Defense Ministry to expunge the names of senior officers like Major General Im as criminal suspects, and that he sent his files, as required by law, to the national police for further investigation. The Defense Ministry retracted the files and later sent the police a revised version, which named only two of the original eight suspects, both of whom were lower-ranking lieutenant colonels.

Mr. Yoon has not addressed Colonel Park’s allegation against him and has not been charged in the case. But Colonel Park was indicted on charges of ​​defaming his superiors and disobeying an order to postpone sending his files to the police​.

In its ruling on Thursday, the military court panel said the insubordination charge could not stand because the Marines’ leadership had no right to delay sending Colonel Park’s findings to the police. It also said there was not enough evidence that the colonel had intended to defame his superiors.

The opposition’s efforts to launch a parliamentary investigation into Mr. Yoon’s role in Colonel Park​’s case have been sidetracked by the​ political turmoil caused by his impeachment.

“There is a long way to go to find out the truth about the death of Lance Corporal Chae,” Colonel Park said at a news conference after the ruling on Thursday.

In easier times for Egypt’s refugees, Azza Mostafa, a pro-government TV anchor, had nothing but generous words for the many thousands of Syrians who had built new lives in Egypt after their own country imploded into civil war in 2011.

“I’d like to say to our Syrian families and our brothers in Egypt,” she said in a 2019 broadcast, “you’ve truly brought light to Egypt.”

But there she was on her show in June, fulminating against Egypt’s growing number of outsiders — an echo of the country’s leaders, whose policy toward refugees and migrants has hardened as they wrestle with an economic crisis made worse by wars in neighboring Gaza, Sudan and Libya.

“This has become unbearable,” Ms. Mostafa said, accusing migrants of driving up rents and promoting female genital mutilation. “There are many acts of overstepping bounds. Is that acceptable? After we opened our country for them?”

Egypt long made it easy for foreigners of all kinds to live and work in the country, largely without interference, whether they were refugees, migrant workers or Westerners escaping coronavirus lockdowns.

The past 13 years have brought a near unbroken stream of newcomers fleeing conflict to the country that is known among Arabs as the “mother of the world.” That includes not just Syrians but also Sudanese, Yemenis, Eritreans and, most recently, Palestinians from Gaza.

Egypt’s lax immigration rules meant many never formally registered as refugees or received official permission to stay long-term, yet managed to stitch themselves almost seamlessly into the country, supporting themselves and sometimes starting businesses.

Since Sudan’s civil war drove a surge of refugees to Egypt starting in 2023, however, the impoverished government in Cairo has complained louder and louder about the burden of foreigners. It rapidly tightened its policies — hoping, analysts and diplomats say, to win more support from international backers eager to prevent migration to their own countries.

Egypt says it spends $10 billion each year on its nine million refugees, according to officials and government-controlled media (though experts say both numbers are greatly exaggerated), all while Egyptians endure soaring prices and subsidy cuts.

Years of government overspending, reliance on imports and policies that neglected private-sector growth left the country’s finances in precarious shape before the wars in Ukraine and Gaza sent them crashing. Egypt lost $7 billion in crucial revenue from the Suez Canal in 2024 as the conflict in Gaza has squeezed shipping in the Red Sea, according to government officials.

With Egypt deep in debt and hard-pressed to pay for imports such as wheat and energy, the currency has crashed, while some goods have become difficult to find.

Ahmed Abu Al-Yazid, the head of a government-owned sugar firm, the Delta Sugar Company, blamed refugees for a sugar shortage that experts link to the economic crisis. The president accused them of draining Egypt’s precious water. On social media, pro-government accounts — some of which appeared to be fake — accused Sudanese refugees of driving up rents and promoting female genital mutilation.

A crackdown soon followed the accusations, according to migrants, refugees and their advocates.

Sudanese refugees have been rounded up in police sweeps, detained and summarily deported. Syrians who have lived in Egypt for years have been told to pay thousands of dollars to stay. Many remain hesitant to return, despite the fall of the Assad regime in December, until the situation stabilizes.

Foreign workers from Asia and from other parts of Africa now face extra hurdles to keep their legal status, and in some cases, have been arrested to compel them to pay high fees, advocates say.

Last month, Egypt passed a law that would hand responsibility for screening refugees and others to the government, instead of to the United Nations refugee agency.

Government officials said the measure would ensure a wide array of refugee rights. Critics of the move, however, said that it would become far harder for refugees to gain protection or access to health care and schools. The law also empowers the government to revoke refugee status on vague grounds such as breaches of national security, political activity or violations of Egyptian social customs.

Abu Saleh, 32, a Syrian who works in a small Cairo grocery, said he had lived in the city for 13 years “without a single issue” until he discovered in July that he could no longer enroll his son in school without a residence permit.

Just to renew his family’s tourist visas, he said, he was told that he would have to return to Syria and pay $2,000 per person in fees — a process he would have to repeat every six months.

“Egypt has been there for us all along,” said Abu Saleh, who asked to be identified by the name he uses around town to avoid possible repercussions. “I’d like to appeal to the government of Egypt: Give us residence, even if it’s a little more expensive. We’re facing tough conditions.”

Egypt has not explained its hardening attitude toward foreigners. But analysts and migrant advocates tie it to the economic crisis, which has generated widespread bitterness and undermined President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s rule.

The newcomers make convenient scapegoats for Egyptians’ hardships, rights groups say. Immigration fees, charged in dollars, can supply some of the foreign currency that Egypt badly needs. And foreigners are also valuable pawns in Egypt’s quest for more financial support from its international partners, rights groups say.

“They think, ‘How can these people be useful for the government?’” said Nour Khalil, executive director of the Refugees Platform in Egypt, which advocates for migrants’ rights.

The U.N. refugee agency counts about 818,000 registered refugees in Egypt, who are entitled to free public health care and education. There are likely many more unregistered refugees, though analysts and aid workers dispute the figure reaches nine million.

The benefits that registered refugees receive mean that Egypt “is treating them like Egyptians, despite the fact that we are not a rich country,” the foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, said at a news conference last month. “There is no country in the world assuming these responsibilities and challenges like here in Egypt. We don’t have one single refugee camp — they are fully integrated in society.”

Refugee advocates agree that Egypt needs more resources. Unlike other countries in the region, including Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, where the United States, the United Nations and the European Union have poured billions into supporting refugees, Egypt has not received significant funds to help house Syrian or other refugees.

That is changing.

As the war in Gaza has pounded Egypt’s finances, Western backers have rushed to Egypt’s aid, anxious to prevent an economic collapse in the Arab world’s most populous country, analysts and diplomats say. A crash in Egypt could further destabilize the Middle East and send a deluge of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, where there is heavy public pressure to restrict migration.

The European Union pledged a fast-tracked $8 billion aid package to Egypt in March, echoing deals the bloc has struck with Mauritania, Tunisia and Turkey that funded migration enforcement in those countries.

Other backers, including the International Monetary Fund, have sent billions more to stabilize Egypt’s economy.

Critics say the European pact with Egypt, like the bloc’s other migration deals, is enabling rights abuses by rewarding Mr. el-Sisi’s authoritarianism and potentially funding the current crackdown on migrants.

Groups including Amnesty International and the Refugees Platform in Egypt have documented what they say is a pattern of mass arbitrary arrests and unlawful deportations of Sudanese refugees — some detained as they were smuggled across the border, others rounded up during random sweeps of predominantly Sudanese neighborhoods.

Some Syrians, too, have been expelled, Mr. Khalil of the refugees platform said. His group has also documented more than 50 arrests of foreign workers, some of whom already had residency, who were held until they paid $1,000 in fees and fines, he said.

An atmosphere of fear has brought throngs of Sudanese to the doorstep of the U.N. refugee agency in Cairo, seeking formal protection. But refugee status can take months, if not years, to obtain: Appointments to begin the process are not available until late 2025. And some of the Sudanese who have been detained and deported, Mr. Khalil said, held some form of U.N. identification, casting doubt on whether the organization could guarantee security.

Among those waiting outside one morning was Mohammed Abdelwahab, 36. By the time he and his family tried to cross the border from Sudan this spring, Egypt had tightly restricted what had been free-flowing movement between the two countries, so they resorted to smugglers instead.

Without legal papers, Mr. Abdelwahab and his 14-year-old son, Mohanad, collected plastic bottles on Cairo’s streets for a living. Mr. Abdelwahab was looking for better work one day in June when Mohanad disappeared.

Twenty days later, Mohanad resurfaced with a WhatsApp message: He had been rounded up with a group of other Sudanese and deported.

Mr. Abdelwahab had been looking for Mohanad in another city. When he returned to Cairo, his wife and three other children had been evicted for nonpayment.

“It’s indescribable,” he said. “Now they’re all camping out here,” he added, referring to his family and indicating the sidewalk in front of the refugee agency, where groups of other Sudanese waited listlessly in the sun.

Emad Mekay and Rania Khaled contributed reporting.