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To be a migrant in Libya is to exist at the intersection of geopolitical calculus and gross human suffering. The mechanics of this reality are quantified with cold precision: In 2024 alone, Libyan authorities intercepted 21,700 individuals in the Mediterranean, a figure that reflects a 28 percent rise from the previous year but remains below the 24,600 recorded in 2022. Within these numbers lie 1,500 women and 700 children, each propelled not by choice but by necessity, only to be ensnared in a system designed to prioritize deterrence over dignity.

These statistics, though illuminating, cannot fully convey the scale of institutionalized neglect. For every person intercepted, there is a story — of flight from conflict and sectarian violence, economic collapse or environmental crisis — terminated not by refuge but by forced return to a country where abuse is systematized.

The architecture of this system is neither accidental nor isolated.

Since 2017, EU investments have fortified Libya’s capacity to patrol its waters, transforming its coast guard into a proxy force for border externalization. Under agreements with EU member states, interdictions have shifted from a focus on rescue to one of containment. The result is a horrifying paradox: EU-funded vessels, trained to “save lives,” routinely return migrants to a network of detention centers, where they are held under arbitrary imprisonment.

Under agreements with EU member states, interdictions have shifted from a focus on rescue to one of containment

Hafed Al-Ghwell

Reports from these facilities — crowded, unventilated and rife with violence — document beatings and extortion. In January 2024, the expulsion of 613 Nigerien nationals to the desert town of Dirkou laid bare the next phase of this cycle. Among them were 63 minors, stripped of possessions and left at a transit center with a 30-person capacity, forced to sleep on sand under a scorching sky. The town, home to 15,000 residents, has become a holding pen for thousands in legal limbo, emblematic of a policy that outsources responsibility to the regions least equipped to bear it.

This calculus of containment extends beyond Libya’s borders.

Collaboration with North African nations has created a buffer zone where migrants are funneled into remote areas, with their presence erased from official records. In late 2023, 400 Nigerians languished for months outside the same Dirkou center, their hopes for repatriation stymied by engineered paralysis. Meanwhile, in the Sahara Desert — a graveyard for those evading interception — migrants vanish into its expanse, victims of dehydration, traffickers or the indifference of nations that fund their containment.

The human toll defies abstraction.

Behind each data point is a reality where women face exploitation as a condition of survival, children grow accustomed to the confines of prison cells and families mortgage their futures to pay ransoms they cannot afford. A January 2025 image from a detention cell in southern Libya, for instance — of a bound and gagged Ethiopian woman, her captors demanding $6,000 for her release — serves as a testament to the normalization of such horrors. These are not anomalies but predictable outcomes of a global framework that treats migration as a security threat rather than a humanitarian imperative.

To be a migrant in Libya is to navigate a world where borders are militarized, compassion is commodified and survival is contingent on escaping notice.

The EU’s role in shaping migration outcomes in Libya is neither peripheral nor passive. Nearly half a billion euros in funds from Brussels allocated to North African border security initiatives between 2020 and 2024 has turned Libya’s coast guard into a de facto extension of Europe’s frontier. This investment, coupled with training programs for more than 1,000 Libyan personnel, enabled the interception of migrants at a volume surpassing pre-COVID-19 levels and eclipsing those recorded in 2023.

Under bilateral agreements, EU member states have outsourced maritime patrols to Libyan forces, shifting operational responsibility for a 180,000 sq. km search and rescue zone. The result? A 72 percent reduction in migrant arrivals to Italy since 2017, achieved by rerouting individuals into Libyan detention centers, where abuse is not collateral damage but a documented norm.

Four of every five intercepted migrants are confined in facilities funded indirectly through EU partnerships, where UN investigators have cataloged systematic violence, including electric shocks and forced labor. Moreover, the Sahara — a repository for those expelled from Libya — claims an estimated (exact figures remain unknowable) 2,000 lives annually but remains absent from official EU risk assessments. This engineered system, framed as a humanitarian endeavor, operates on a simple arithmetic: deterrence measured in bodies intercepted, not lives saved.

The mechanics of deterrence extend beyond the Mediterranean.

Individuals are rerouted into Libyan detention centers, where abuse is not collateral damage but a documented norm

Hafed Al-Ghwell

Libyan authorities, with EU support, collaborate with neighboring states to create a zone of displacement. Expulsions to Niger, Algeria and other North African nations have become routine, with migrants abandoned in remote areas devoid of infrastructure. Such operations are not anomalies but components of a policy framework that prioritizes containment over compassion.

Libya’s collapse into ungoverned fragmentation since 2011 has birthed a shadow economy where human lives are currency. At least 42 detention centers — officially recognized or clandestine — operate as nodes in a network that generates an estimated $1,200 per person. Guards in these facilities, some trained and equipped through European partnerships, systematically extort families, demanding an average of $3,500 for release. In 2024 alone, more than 15,000 migrants reported being sold multiple times between armed groups, while nearly a third of all women detained in Libyan centers disclosed gender-based violence as a tool of coercion.

This commercialized cruelty thrives precisely because it is profitable: a single militia can net $15 million annually, rivaling Libya’s prewar oil revenues per capita. When EU-trained forces return migrants to shore, they are not delivering them to safety but to an auction block — a reality that renders Europe’s “humanitarian” investments not just ineffective, but complicit.

As a result, the data paints a grim portrait of policy efficacy. EU-backed interceptions have altered migration routes but not volumes. Despite a 12 percent drop in Mediterranean crossings from 2022 to 2024, deaths per attempted voyage have risen, with riskier journeys and deadlier consequences. These are the unacknowledged costs of a system that treats migration as a problem to be managed rather than a crisis to be resolved.

Thus, as Libya’s detention centers swell and desert waystations collapse under demand, one question persists: What does it mean to be a migrant in such a world? It means confronting the paradox of globalized indifference — a reality where borders are enforced with militarized precision, but human lives are surrendered to everything else.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. X: @HafedAlGhwell