Laminae is a citizen of Guinea Conakry who for years in Morocco has experienced discrimination due to the color of his skin. «There are many foreigners here. There are Tunisians or people from other Maghreb countries. But when we walk together, they don’t stop them. [Quando] I’m alone, but they stop me,” he says.
Sub-Saharan migrants in the capital Rabat risk being arbitrarily forcibly picked up and put aboard white vans patrolling the streets by officers in civilian clothes, usually from the Auxiliary Forces. Journalists were able to collect images documenting these practices in October 2023.
Those stopped are taken to police stations where their fingerprints are scanned. They are subsequently loaded onto larger buses and then expelled into the desert, in the most internal areas of the country. It happened in Lamine in 2018, but news of the discovery of migrant bodies in the internal regions of Morocco was already available in 2006, near Oujda, a city on the border with Algeria.
Even on the southern Moroccan border, for years, military patrols of the Polisario Front, the armed wing of the Saharawi people of Western Sahara, have reported the discovery of bodies. These are presumably victims of expulsions into the desert. Which still continue today in a systematic manner.
According to a news agency close to the government, Morocco would have stopped 75,000 attempts at irregular migration to Europe in 2023. Of these, 18 thousand would have occurred at sea or at the land borders with Ceuta and Melilla. It means that around 57 thousand migrants would have been arrested within the country and at least some of them are among those dumped at the border.
In answering questions from # journalistsDesertDumps, the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior explained that «national legislation provides for the transfer of migrants to other cities». The aim is to distance them “from trafficking networks and dangerous areas such as forests and deserts” and offer “them greater protection and respect for their dignity”.
