After 18 Years in Malta, DJ Dollarino Faces Deportation From the Place He Calls Home

Two years ago, DJ Dollarino sat in front of an African Media Association Malta camera and spoke about his dream of bringing people together through music. Today, after spending almost his entire adult life in Malta, he is in detention and facing deportation.

DJ Dollarino in 2024 during the interview with AMAM

In May 2024, Yusupha Dibassey, better known in Malta as DJ Dollarino, sat down with African Media Association Malta (AMAM) for an episode of its Empowering Communities series. The conversation was about music, ambition and community.

Originally from The Gambia, Dibassey had already been living in Malta for 16 years. He spoke enthusiastically about BPM - Best Promoter Malta - the initiative he had created to promote reggae, dancehall and Afrobeat and, ultimately, to create opportunities for other artists.

His ambition was bigger than becoming a successful DJ himself.

I’m trying to put the young people together to be positive,

He said during the interview that he was "trying to put the young people together to be positive". Dibassey explained that he had been organising events since around 2016, often using money from his regular job to finance them. The objective, he insisted, was not simply commercial.

“It’s not about the business,” he said. If BPM eventually became successful, his dream was to use it to support other young people trying to develop their talents.

At one point, asked about opportunities for musicians in other countries, Dibassey struggled to make a comparison, for the fact the had not moved from Malta for 16 years. “I have been living here for 16 years”, he said. Two years later, that sentence carries a very different weight.

On 10 August 2026, Dibassey turned up to renew his documents and was detained. He faces possible deportation from Malta. As of 19 August, he remains in detention. He arrived in Malta in 2008, aged 23. For approximately 18 years, he has lived under the system commonly known among rejected asylum seekers as the “Yellow Book”, periodically renewing documentation that allowed him to work while providing no permanent right to remain in the country.

Now, at 41, the country where he spent almost his entire adult life may deport him.

From temporary stay to a life

Dance Beyond Borders (DBB), which produces Refugee Week Malta, sent an urgent appeal to Equality and Civil Rights Minister Rosianne Cutajar and Home Affairs and Security Minister Glenn Bedingfield on 18 August, asking the authorities to reconsider Dibassey’s case.

According to DBB, Dibassey is currently being asked to accept voluntary return, which he has declined.

The organisation argues that describing his presence in Malta simply in terms of immigration status fails to capture what 18 years represent in a person's life. Dibassey has worked with Refugee Week Malta for six years, performing as a DJ and serving for the past two years on its Advisory Group. In its letter, DBB describes him as someone who has become part of the communities around him through music, friendships, volunteering and cultural activities.

The appeal has been endorsed by 20 organisations and 67 community members, while 38 people from the Refugee Week Malta and music communities submitted testimonials about him.

AMAM is among the organisations that endorsed the appeal. Its director, who has known Dibassey for years through AMAM and Refugee Week Malta and interviewed him in 2024, also submitted a personal testimony:

DJ is such a good and caring person. He will ask you many times if you are doing well. He will ask about your family, your siblings, your children; and he asks genuinely. He belongs here in Malta. He has built his life here, his relationships are here, his community is here, and the people who have become his family are here.

AMAM is a media partner of Refugee Week Malta and has covered activities involving migrant communities over the years. Through that work, Dibassey was not simply someone appearing in front of AMAM's camera. As a participant in Refugee Week and an asylum seeker active in the community, he had become almost a colleague.

The 2024 interview provides a record of that relationship long before his detention became news.

During the conversation, Dibassey spoke about the difficulties faced by aspiring migrant musicians in Malta: the cost of studio time, the pressure of working to pay rent and bills, and the lack of resources to develop artistic projects. Yet his answer was not to leave. He wanted to build something here.

Dibassey spoke of creating spaces where young artists could come together and receive support. He talked about Refugee Week activities, African Day, music, food and volunteering. His audiences, he said, were mixed: African and European.

A familiar "Yellow Book" question

Dibassey’s case also raises a question Malta has confronted before. In 2024, AMAM reported on the deportation of Ghanaian national Kusi Dismark, who had lived and worked in Malta for 13 years after his asylum application was rejected. Like Dibassey, Dismark had lived under the Yellow Book system.

The "yellow book", a temporary permit to stay and work allows failed asylum seekers to work legally in Malta until the governement decides their removal, which can happen at any moment, even after 20 years of residence in the country.

The document can allow rejected asylum seekers to work legally while they remain in Malta, but it does not provide the security of a residence permit. This creates a situation in which people may spend years working and establishing relationships in Malta without acquiring a durable right to stay.

Dibassey renewed his status roughly every three months. DBB estimates that over 18 years this happened around 70 times.The organisation acknowledges in its appeal that Dibassey knew his status was temporary. But it argues that responsibility for what happened during those 18 years cannot be viewed from only one side. DBB wrote:

For eighteen years the State also chose again and again, roughly seventy times, to let him remain, to let him work, and to let him become part of this community. That sustained pattern is not incidental; it is what allowed a life to take root here.

DBB has also raised human rights arguments in its appeal. It argues that Dibassey’s circumstances should be considered in light of the right to private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, pointing particularly to his length of residence, integration and personal and social ties in Malta.

The organisation has asked the government to examine whether discretion can be exercised in his case, clarify what avenues of appeal or reconsideration remain available to him, and give him an opportunity to regularise his status.

As of 19 August, no response from the ministers has been communicated to the organisations supporting the appeal, and Dibassey remains detained. His case is therefore still unfolding.

But the broader question it raises is not new. When AMAM interviewed Dibassey in 2024, there was no campaign to stop his deportation. He was not being asked to demonstrate his integration or convince authorities that he belonged. He was simply talking about the life he was already living: working, organising events, supporting other artists and imagining what he could build next.

He had already spent 16 years in Malta. Today, it is 18.

The question his detention poses goes beyond whether a temporary document creates a legal entitlement to remain. It is also about what happens when temporary status lasts long enough for an entire adult life to be built around it.

At what point does temporary become a life?