Hunt for African Migrants in Algeria: The Xenophobic and Racist Face of the Military Regime Laid Bare
Behind the language of sovereignty and security, Algeria’s military regime is carrying out a policy of mass expulsions that increasingly resembles an organized hunt targeting African migrants. Reports by international NGOs and reputable media outlets paint a disturbing picture: tens of thousands of men and women, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, are arrested, forcibly transported, and abandoned in the desert, often without water, food, or assistance, at the border with Niger.
This policy is neither accidental nor isolated. It exposes the deeply xenophobic and racist nature of a military system that has chosen African migrants as convenient scapegoats to conceal its own economic, social, and political failures. Official Algeria, quick to adopt moral postures on the international stage, is in practice enforcing a brutal and dehumanizing approach that stands in clear contradiction to the international conventions it claims to uphold.
Testimonies and documented reports describe the same pattern repeatedly: arbitrary arrests, collective expulsions carried out without due process, migrants registered with the UNHCR pushed back without any examination of their legal or humanitarian status, families torn apart, and lives deliberately placed in danger. The Algerian desert has become a zone of shame, a lawless space where survival depends on chance and on the limited capacity of neighboring countries and humanitarian actors to intervene.
What makes these practices even more alarming is their systematic nature. They are not excesses committed by rogue actors, but part of a repeated and deliberate strategy, implemented year after year. In 2025, expulsions reportedly reached unprecedented levels, while Algerian authorities maintained a deafening silence and shifted the burden of the humanitarian fallout onto Niger and international aid organizations.
This approach reveals a regime obsessed with security control and incapable of addressing migration through any lens other than repression. African migrants are reduced to unwanted bodies, erased from public space and stripped of dignity. Such a policy is not only inhumane, it is profoundly at odds with Algeria’s claim to African solidarity and shared continental destiny.
History will remember that at a time when parts of Africa were seeking cooperative, humane and responsible responses to migration, the Algerian military regime chose abandonment, desert expulsions and institutional violence. In the face of such practices, silence is no longer an option.
Translated from Abderrazzak Boussaid’s French article – le7tv
