Desert Dumps

Europe supports, finances and is directly involved in clandestine operations in North African countries to dump tens of thousands of Black people in the desert or remote areas each year to prevent them from coming to the EU.

Funds for these desert dumps have been paid under the guise of “migration management” with the EU claiming that the money doesn’t support human rights abuses against sub-Saharan African communities in North Africa. Brussels claims publicly that it closely monitors how this money is spent. But the reality is different.

In a year-long investigation with the Washington Post, Enass, Der Spiegel, El Pais, IrpiMedia, ARD, Inkyfada and Le Monde, we reveal that Europe knowingly funds, and in some instances is directly involved in systematic racial profiling detention and expulsion of Black communities across at least three North African countries.

Our findings show that in Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, refugees and migrant workers, some of whom were on their way towards Europe, as well as people who had legal status and established livelihoods in these countries, are apprehended based on the colour of their skin, loaded onto buses and driven to the middle of nowhere, often arid desert areas.

There, they are left without any assistance, water or food, leaving them at risk of kidnapping, extortion, torture, sexual violence, and, in the worst instances, death. Others are taken to border areas where they are reportedly sold by the authorities to human traffickers and gangs who torture them for ransom.

This investigation amounts to the most comprehensive attempt yet to document European knowledge and involvement with anti-migrant, racially motivated operations in North Africa. It exposes how not only has this system of mass displacement and abuse been known about in Brussels for years, but that it is run thanks to money, vehicles, equipment, intelligence and security forces provided by the EU and European countries.

METHODS

The team interviewed more than 50 survivors of these expulsions across Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia – all of whom were from Sub-Saharan or West African countries – which helped us to recognise the systematic and racially-motivated nature of the practices. Some survivors supplied visual material and/or location data from their journey, which we were able to geolocate to support their accounts and map out what happened.

As well as visual material supplied by survivors, we used open source methods to find videos posted on social media purporting to show dumps taking place. We sought to geolocate and verify these cases. In the case of Tunisia, we were able to verify 13 incidents that occurred between July 2023 and May 2024 in which groups of Black people were rounded up in cities or at ports and driven many miles away, usually close to the Libyan or Algerian borders, and dumped, as well as one incident of a group being handed over to Libyan security forces and then incarcerated in a detention centre.

Where visual evidence of the operations wasn’t available online, we documented it through ground reporting. In Morocco we followed the paramilitaries of the Auxiliary Forces and filmed them picking up Black people from the streets three times over three days in the capital, Rabat. We also filmed people being detained in local government buildings before being loaded onto unmarked buses and taken to remote areas.

In Mauritania we used similar techniques by observing a detention centre in the capital Nouakchott. We witnessed and filmed refugees and migrants being brought to the centre in a large truck and Spanish police officers entering the detention centre on a regular basis. We filmed a white bus with migrants in it leaving the detention centre towards the border with Mali, an active warzone.

By speaking with current and former EU staff members, as well as sources within national police forces and international organisations with a presence in the countries where the dumps are taking place, we established that the EU is well aware of the dump operations and sometimes directly involved.

European officials have expressed concern over escalating operations in the region against sub-Saharan African migrants, and consistently denied that funds are being used to violate basic rights. But two senior EU sources said it was “impossible” to fully account for the way in which European funding was ultimately used.

One consultant who worked on projects funded by the EU Trust Fund, under which the EU has given Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco more than €400m for migration management in recent years, said of the aims of the fund: “You have to make migrants’ lives difficult. Complicate their lives. If you leave a migrant from Guinea in the Sahara [in Morocco] twice, the third time he will ask you to voluntarily bring him back home.”

Using freedom of information laws, we were able to obtain a number of internal documents, including one from the EU’s border agency Frontex from earlier this year stating that Morocco was racially profiling and forcibly relocating mainly Black migrants. We also unearthed hard-to-find publicly available documents showing that EU officials have held internal discussions on some of the abusive practices since at least 2019. They also revealed that the EU is directly funding the Moroccan paramilitary auxiliary forces, who we filmed rounding up people with black skin in the capital.

Crucially, we were able to match vehicles used during the round-up and expulsions to vehicles provided by European countries by identifying tenders and carrying out visual analyses. For example in Tunisia, the Nissan vehicles we observed being used by the National Police in raids to arrest migrants before they are driven to desert areas match in make and model with those donated to Tunisia by Italy and Germany.

We also spoke with analysts and academics who told us the European funding links make the EU accountable for these abuses. “The fact is that European countries do not want to get their hands dirty,” said Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche, a law professor at the University of Lyon and a specialist in human rights and migration. “They don’t want to be held responsible for human rights violations and outsource them to others. I believe that, under international law, they are indeed responsible.”

STORYLINES

Timothy Hucks, a 33-year-old US citizen, was arrested by plainclothes officers a few metres from his home in Rabat in 2019. He recalls how he showed his American driver’s licence and offered to get his passport from his flat, but the officer handcuffed him and shoved him into the back of a white van.

Hucks, who now lives in Spain, recalls being taken to a police station where around 40 Black men were crammed together in a dirty room with broken toilets. The security forces took his fingerprints and a photo of him. They asked questions that sounded like accusations: was he a terrorist? A member of Boko Haram? “It’s difficult to describe how angry I was at that moment,” says Hucks. He was then transported along with the other men to a town about 200km south of Rabat, and abandoned. Eventually, he found a bus to take him back to Rabat.

In another case, Idiatou, a Guinea woman in her twenties, told how she was intercepted at sea while trying to reach the Canary Islands from Mauritania. She was taken to a detention centre in the capital Nouakchott, where Spanish police officers took her photograph before she was forced in a white bus towards the border with Mali. There, in the middle of nowhere, she and 29 other people were sent away. “The Mauritanians chased us like animals,” she recalls. “I was afraid that someone would rape me.” After four days of walking she managed to reach a village and found a driver who took her to a relative in Senegal.

Further east in Tunisia, François, a 38-year-old Cameroonian national, describes how he was intercepted at sea by the Tunisian National Maritime Guard while trying to reach Italy on an overcrowded boat. He was then boarded onto buses with dozens of other sub-Saharan Africans and taken to the desert area near the Algerian border. He was able to hide his phone so it wasn’t confiscated by the police, and he provided us with GPS data and photographs from the journey, enabling us to verify his account.

At the Algerian border, François and the group of around 30 people were abandoned by the Tunisian security forces and ordered to walk towards Algeria. Facing warning shots from the Algerian side, they decided to head back to Tunisia. “There were two pregnant women in the group and a child with a heel infection […] We were thirsty. We began to suffer hallucinations,” he recalls. They walked for nine days, more than 40 kilometres, before finally finding transport to take them back to the Tunisian city of Sfax.

Videos by Jack Sapoch / Lighthouse Reports