The door first slams in the inspectors’ faces, but only briefly. Nidal Ibrahim smiles when he opens the door again to let inspectors from the Zgharta district into his small flat, where his family of nine has lived since fleeing the Syrian town of Idlib four years ago.

We are in northern Lebanon on a Monday night. Like every night, a team of 18 inspectors is dispatched around town to check that Syrians are not out in the streets after the curfew, to see who lives in which building, to photograph any new resident and record his name and city of origin in Syria, and to warn anyone whose residency permit has expired that they need to fix it as soon as possible.

Cases like that of Ibrahim’s 19-year-old son are common. “Because there’s not enough work, I didn’t renew my work permit,” Nayef Ibrahim told Al-Monitor. He doesn’t leave the house anymore, as he could be arrested and imprisoned. Syrians also often report that their Lebanese employers try to extort money from them in exchange for a work permit, which costs the employer $200 a year, paid directly to the Lebanese state.

Such inspections have become more frequent in northern Lebanon since the rape and murder late September of Raya Chidiac, a 26-year-old wealthy Christian woman who lived in the town of Miziara. The man who strangled her with a plastic bag was Syrian and had worked for her family for years as their building’s caretaker. He was arrested and confessed to the murder.