Migrants in Tunisia transferred to Libya prisons

Tunisian authorities have stopped and transferred thousands of migrants to Libyan prisons since last September, InfoMigrants reports.

“We were stopped under the olive trees”; “I was stopped at sea”; “We were picked up in the street, near Sfax”. These are just a few examples of messages received by InfoMigrants in recent weeks from Senegalese, Guinean and Sudanese sub-Saharan Africans. They all tell the same story: an arbitrary arrest in Tunisia on land or at sea after an attempted crossing, followed by collective expulsion to neighbouring Libya.

According to the report, these methods are not new. Tunisian authorities rounded up thousands of exiles in southern Tunisia this summer and sent them to the desert region along the border between Libya and Algeria, where at least twenty people — including women and children — died of thirst.

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Earlier this year, President Kais Saied made an inflammatory, racist speech, declaring that immigration into Tunisia is a plot aimed at changing the demography of the country.

Saied called on security forces to take “urgent measures” against the “hordes” of undocumented sub-Saharan Africans he accused of being responsible for a wave of crimes.

Following the speech, armed mobs attacked black people, robbed them and threatened women with sexual violence.

People who had suffered violence or had lost their homes or jobs because of the speech, later reported being arrested if they spoke to the media.

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