On 20 May, The Washington Post, along with Lighthouse Reports and a consortium of international media outlets, published a joint investigation titled ‘With Europe’s support, North African nations push migrants to the desert’. The report found that European Union and individual European nations were ‘supporting and financing aggressive operations by governments in North Africa to detain tens of thousands of migrants each year and dump them in remote areas, often barren deserts’. The investigation focuses on Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania, which have some of the deepest EU migration partnerships, claiming that these ‘clandestine operations’ mainly targeted black migrants. It further adds that ‘draconian practices’ were being deployed in these three countries to ‘dissuade sub-Saharan migrants from risky crossings to Europe’.
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