In an official statement, Mayotte’s police claimed the small boat’s pilots had “deliberately rammed” the police vessel. The two kwassa pilots were sentenced to three years in prison.

But a video and police testimony obtained by Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and Komune raise serious doubts about the official account.

The 30-second segment, filmed by a police officer, shows their boat closing in until it is directly alongside the kwassa. A passenger appears to throw a stone. An officer then uses a hooked pole to try to tear away a fuel line from one of the engines. At that exact moment, one of the two pilots (wearing a red shirt in the video) is seen releasing the helm.

The kwassa abruptly loses speed, spins and slides under the police boat. A flashlight beam cuts through the darkness. Passengers are already in the water as the vessel goes down. An officer shouts: “Shit – overboard, overboard!”

During the investigation, a policeman said their use of the hook was what caused a pilot to let go of the helm: “I was approaching, and to avoid the hook, the helmsman who was on the right-hand side of the boat let go of the 75-horsepower engine, causing their boat to veer sharply towards us”, he said, “their boat started taking on water, the passengers panicked and all went to the same side, which caused the boat to capsize.”

An officer stated that while he was trying to rescue a four-year-old girl, a passenger used the girl for leverage to climb aboard and he saw her eyes ‘roll back.’ She was taken to hospital in a critical condition. Earlier this week, the prosecutor of Mayotte confirmed she was out of danger.

The incident is part of a broader pattern. In September 2025, we revealed that French authorities in Mayotte routinely used aggressive interception tactics such as collisions, encirclement and wave generation despite the absence of any formal doctrine permitting these practices. We found that multiple shipwrecks and at least 25 deaths, including one as recently as March, have resulted from these interceptions, highlighting the risks.

METHODS

We obtained and analysed previously unseen footage filmed by a police officer. We cross-checked the footage against judicial hearings including police accounts to identify inconsistencies. In parallel, we interviewed lawyers and survivors to gather accounts of the interceptions. We also spoke to experts and police officers who provided technical assessments of the tactics used at sea.

STORYLINES

A month after the incident visible on the video we obtained, on March 28, 2026, a similar interception took place. This time it ended with the death of a passenger.

Officers say the kwassa’s pilot refused to stop and endangered those on board. They describe attempting to stop the engine by disconnecting the fuel line. They claim the pilot then made a sharp 90-degree turn into their path, causing the collision. The small boat took on water and capsized.

Among those thrown into the sea were three children, including a nine-month-old baby, five women and a 73-year-old man. Twenty-four people were rescued. Hidaya B., a woman in her fifties from Anjouan in Comoros, suffered head injuries and could not be revived.

Survivors interviewed, now held in a detention centre in Mayotte, blame the police’s maneuvers. “The police capsized our boat,” said Farid S., who alleges the victim’s head was crushed by the interceptor’s engine.

“They overturned us,” said another passenger, Ahmed S., 21.

A third survivor, Anzidine M., described officers “hitting the pilot on the arms with metal poles” and crashing into the kwassa before “driving straight over it”, adding: “There was blood everywhere.” Eleven passengers have filed civil complaints, according to their lawyer, Céline Cooper.

Responding to our questions, the Prosecutor of Mayotte said an investigation had been opened against the smugglers for aggravated manslaughter and aggravated aiding and abetting of immigration.

The Police meanwhile declined to answer our questions, but five officers were decorated for their intervention on March 28th. “Faced with the absolute emergency of shipwreck victims unable to swim,” officials stated, “the crew members of the interceptor showed exemplary courage by immediately jumping in to assist the victims and deploying rescue equipment.”

The post Caught on camera : French police cause capsize appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

But in Tennessee, where Republicans hold a supermajority in both state legislative chambers, many elected officials have welcomed ICE with open arms. GOP Gov. Bill Lee and other state leaders have actively paired state police with ICE agents, offering the federal agency a powerful force multiplier.

In May, a week-long enforcement effort dubbed “Operation Flood the Zone” that teamed Tennessee Highway Patrol with ICE on the streets of Nashville, signaled a new level of cooperation between state leaders and the Trump administration. Nine months after the state and federal operation, Nashville residents are still searching for answers about who was taken and deported, and the role that Tennessee played in targeting residents.

In the wake of the Nashville operation, state and federal officials turned their sights on Memphis, launching the “Memphis Safe Task Force.” More than 1,500 federal agents are still working alongside hundreds of state troopers and the National Guard. City leaders and residents in both Nashville and Memphis say they have received little information from the state or the White House about these collaborations.

Lighthouse Reports in partnership with Mother Jones, the Nashville Banner, Nashville Noticias, NewsChannel 5 and the Institute for Public Service Reporting spent six months collecting and analyzing data, including thousands of pages of ICE documents, hundreds of criminal court records and Tennessee Highway Patrol incident reports. We also examined 50-plus hours of Tennessee Highway Patrol dashcam and bodycam footage. We found that 75 percent of those detained in Nashville had no criminal record, and that state troopers and ICE appeared to racially profile Latino drivers. Troopers chose to ignore traffic violations to continue helping ICE, and they targeted neighborhoods with the largest number of Latino and immigrant families. For the first time, using a vast federal database, the investigation was also able to track those targeted, from their arrests on the street through the immigration detention system and onto deportation planes. Then, when federal and state officials moved their operation from Nashville to Memphis, we followed them, analyzing hundreds of pages of arrest affidavits to find that dangerous high-speed chases, initiated by state troopers deployed to the city to work alongside ICE, increased by more than 400 percent during the first five weeks of the “Memphis Safe Task Force.”

METHODS

To determine who was arrested during the May 2025 Nashville operation, we dug into more than a million ICE records released by the Deportation Data Project. The data trove contains anonymized individual-level ICE records covering arrests, detainers, and detentions from September 2023 to October 2025, in addition to encounters and removals data from September 2023 to July 2025.

By combining these data with bystander video, interviews, police dashcam and bodycam footage, and highway patrol incident reports, we reconstructed the anatomy of the operation carried out by ICE and Tennessee Highway Patrol. This allowed us to follow people through the deportation pipeline from arrest to deportation.

By analyzing bystander video, police video, and geocoordinates in Highway Patrol incident reports we were able to map the areas of Nashville targeted by state troopers and ICE.

Additionally, in Memphis we reviewed hundreds of arrest affidavits filed over the first five weeks of the Memphis Safe Task Force from September 29 to November 3. By isolating “evading arrest” charges we identified 75 separate vehicle pursuits.

STORYLINES

During a Nashville press conference, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said of the people arrested: “All of these criminals are evil, they’re horrible human beings, they’re the worst of the worst.” In reality, 75 percent of those detained had never committed a crime, and some were in the process of becoming legal U.S. residents.

Leugim Romero was on his way home after working a late shift when he was stopped by THP and ICE. From Venezuela, Romero had filed for asylum and was in the U.S. legally. Examining the police video, we discovered that ICE accused Romero of being part of the gang Tren de Aragua because he had tattoos. Romero has since been deported to Venezuela.

Tennessee Highway Patrol officers used traffic stop pretexts such as bent license plates, unlit temporary tags, and dark window tints to pull people over, so that ICE, which can’t make routine traffic stops, could check their immigration status—and bypass constitutional and legal protections. During the stops, some ICE agents were masked and carried assault rifles and “window punches,” in case drivers refused to roll down their windows.

In Nashville, the majority of people arrested and deported were Latino. Troopers and ICE agents appeared to racially profile drivers during the operation. “This might fill us up,” says a state trooper to an ICE agent in his squad car. “They’re definitely not English speakers.” Records also show that the traffic stops resulted in few criminal or traffic law enforcement actions, despite Tennessee officials and ICE claiming the enforcement was for public safety and to arrest the “worst of the worst.”

Elsewhere in Tennessee, during the first five weeks of the Memphis Safe Task Force operation, dangerous high-speed pursuits initiated by Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers increased by 400 percent. Troopers sent to Memphis are working alongside ICE and other federal agents. In one case, a pursuit lasted for a quarter-hour, as troopers at high speeds pursued a blue Chevy Malibu with a woman and infant inside. The vehicle struck a trooper’s squad car, then a telephone pole. The pursuit was initiated because the driver had “failed to dim his bright lights.”

The post License to Profile appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

A year-long investigation with Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Times and Arte proves for the first time that the French police are responsible for the deaths or disappearances of at least 24 people – including pregnant women and children – during violent interceptions at sea off the coast of Mayotte. The incidents span from 2007 to July 2025.

The revelations come as Paris, under pressure from London, has announced a shift in the English Channel – that French forces will soon be permitted to intercept migrant boats at sea, a move that has raised concern among the French search and rescue authorities, police unions and government ministers.

Tens of thousands of people attempt the crossing from the nearby Comorian Island of Anjouan each year in search of better work opportunities, healthcare and education on the French Island, which is situated off the east coast of Africa. It’s estimated 10,000 people have drowned while trying to make this journey since 1995.

METHODS

Journalists collected 20 detailed survivor testimonies, including accounts from recent shipwrecks, as well as interviewing former smugglers, local residents and children who made the crossing, many of whom described lasting trauma.

In parallel, the team gained access to judicial and administrative case files documenting past incidents, as well as police and gendarmerie reports. These provided corroboration of incidents where police vessels collided with migrant boats.

To cross-check these accounts, reporters conducted confidential interviews with six serving and former officials from the French interior and defense ministries who had been posted to Mayotte. Their statements confirmed that aggressive tactics were part of routine practice.

Finally, the investigation relied on official statistics and records from the prefecture of Mayotte, maritime surveillance centers and court archives, allowing reporters to establish a count of at least 24 deaths linked to interceptions since 2007.

Together, these methods revealed a consistent pattern: while authorities publicly frame operations as rescue missions, evidence from witnesses, documents and insiders show that dangerous interception practices are commonplace.

STORYLINES

In the early hours of 15 July 2025, a small fishing boat known as a kwassa approached the shores of Mayotte after a ten-hour journey from the Comoros. On board were 27 passengers, including children and the elderly, hoping to reach French territory. Instead, the crossing ended in tragedy.

Zoubert*, 25, had boarded the kwassa in Anjouan, Comoros, to return to Mayotte, where he grew up. Land was in sight when a French police vessel struck them. “Our boat tore apart, everyone fell into the sea,” he recalled. He says the officers pulled back about 30 meters and waited up to 15 seconds before reacting. “Everyone was screaming. They watched us drown without moving.” Zoubert claims he saw a teenage girl and an elderly man disappear beneath the water.

Ahamada*, 24, was traveling with his young niece and nephew. He remembers their pilot trying to flee towards the beach when the police boat rammed them from behind. “That’s when they hit us,” he said. After the impact, he saw his four-year-old nephew sink into the water. “It’s really vile. If they had let us land, they could have arrested us without killing people.”

Farid Djassadi, 31, told us how both his legs were severed by the engine of a police boat that collided with the small boat he had boarded in Anjouan. The impact threw him overboard. Court documents we obtained detail the incident, noting that the police boat’s permit had expired and that none of the officers had completed the required training to drive the boat. Despite multiple investigations, prosecutions have largely targeted smugglers, not security forces.

Other survivors echo these accounts. In total twenty people described police circling boats to churn up waves until water flooded the fragile vessels, or colliding with the bow to destabilise them.

Six officials from the interior and armed forces described the use of collisions and wave-making to force kwassas to stop.

One senior gendarme admitted that patrol boats sometimes “cut across the route” of migrant vessels or even “hit their bows” to block them. “We get behind the boat, into its wake, and then we go after it,” he explained. “Once we’re in their trail, they stop because their lives are at risk — but if they keep going, we are forced to ram them.” Another officer justified creating “artificial waves” by steering in S-shaped movements, which flood the kwassas and force them to stop, even if it risks capsizing them.

A former maritime affairs official who served nearly 15 years in Mayotte criticized the lack of training and seafaring knowledge among police units. “They might get three weeks of training at best, then shadow colleagues on interceptors. They’re sent out without the proper skills,” he said.

France announced it would now authorize the “boarding” of boats leaving its northern coast for Britain — a concession to London’s demands amid record crossings. For years, French authorities resisted such a shift, warning that police-style interceptions at sea posed grave risks. Hervé Berville, then Secretary of State for the Sea, wrote to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal in spring 2024 urging against it. In his letter, he described such actions as “ineffective and even dangerous,” carrying risks both for officers and for migrants, including “the risk of mass drownings.”

Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior pressed forward, arguing that standard rescue operations were insufficient as crossings surged past 28,000 since the start of the year. According to one senior official, the new doctrine envisions the possibility of encircling migrant boats to force them back or stop them mid-sea.

The Mayotte investigation suggests what this may mean in practice. For more than two decades, aggressive interception maneuvers — collisions, wave-making, ramming — have been used out of sight in the Indian Ocean, causing at least 24 deaths.

*Identities have been protected

The post “They hit us and watched us drown” appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The number of people crossing the river in order to enter the US has soared in recent years. In 2021, the state of Texas launched a multi-billion dollar initiative to stop asylum seekers from stepping foot in the US, called Operation Lone Star, erecting hundreds of miles of razor wire, floating buoys and other barriers. Meanwhile in Mexico, the number of troops on its northern border doubled by 2022. Yet the number of deaths continued to climb.

Lighthouse Reports, in partnership with The Washington Post in the US and El Universal in Mexico, spent a year collecting and analysing data from every Texas county and Mexican state along the Rio Grande. We found at least 1,107 people drowned crossing the Rio Grande between Texas and Mexico from 2017 to 2023, a figure significantly higher than has been previously reported.

In Texas, we documented 858 migrant drownings, while the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is legally mandated to record migrant deaths, recorded 587 along the entire southwest border. In Mexico, where no single agency is comprehensively documenting migration-related deaths, we found records of 249 people who drowned in the river.

The deadliest stretch of the river during this time was the Texan city of Eagle Pass, which has been described as “ground zero” for Operation Lone Star. While most bodies were found near the city’s international bridges prior to 2021, as more border barriers were erected under Operation Lone Star, more drowning victims were found further downstream.

While the data alone was insufficient to establish whether Operation Lone Star caused more deaths, experts said militarization on both sides of the border had pushed some people to cross in more remote and dangerous parts of the river.

Our data on drownings reveals the changing demographic of those dying in the Rio Grande as more families with children attempted to cross. In 2023 about one in five drowning victims was a woman and one in ten a child. More people from nationalities other than Mexican were increasingly dying in the river. After peaking in 2022, drowning deaths dropped in 2023 but analysis of available data for 2024 indicates they are rising again.

METHODS

We requested records of drowning deaths in the Rio Grande from 165 local, state, and federal agencies in the United States and Mexico. Eventually, 52 sources provided data after hundreds of emails, phone calls, and 25 in-person visits to local offices across Texas. Many of the agencies approached responded that they do not keep these records, some charged prohibitive fees to access the information or simply refused to answer. Data availability and completeness were particularly problematic in Mexico.

Incomplete official data in both the US and Mexico leave many deaths uncounted. We benchmarked our data against CBP’s publicly-available figures and underlying data obtained by journalists and researchers through Freedom of Information Act requests. Our data on child drownings was benchmarked against the International Organization for Migration’s missing migrants which is compiled using both official records and media monitoring.

To investigate the impact of Texas’ border barriers on the frequency and location of drowning deaths, we mapped nearly 250 miles of state and federal security infrastructure on the border, including fences, federal border walls, containers and a floating buoy barrier, by analysing satellite imagery and official reports. We also plotted the locations of drowning victims using geographic coordinates and by reviewing location descriptions in incident reports. This enabled us to compare drowning trends with changes in security infrastructure, although we were not able to establish a causal relationship using statistical analysis due to data limitations.

This methodology describes our data collection and analysis in more detail.

STORYLINES

Four-year old Angelica was found clinging to her father’s lifeless body in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas. Her family, originally from Venezuela, had fled the brutal economic and political situation in their home country, and were seeking a better life in the United States. The entire family, Angelica’s father, mother, uncle, and 11-year-old brother, Santiago, drowned while trying to wade across the Rio Grande in November 2023. Angelica was the only survivor.

Carolina, 27, and her children Kylian, 3, and baby Noel, just two months old, fled the dictatorship in Nicaragua to join her husband in the United States. Both of the children drowned in August 2022, in the same section of river, where police and soldiers have been deployed to stop asylum seekers from touching US soil.

Militarizing the river is a binational effort. In 2022, as the number of drowning deaths peaked, so did Mexico’s deployment of soldiers to turn back asylum seekers: more than 11,500 soldiers from the Army and the National Guard were sent that year, double the number in 2019, when Mexico first deployed its military as immigration enforcers.

In Texas, under Operation Lone Star, more than 10,000 National Guard soldiers and police have been deployed to the river, since it began in March 2021.

The militarization of immigration has made migration more lethal, especially for vulnerable women and children, experts said. Jerónimo del Río García, a researcher at the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic Rule of Law, said the militarization of migration policy in Mexico has triggered an increase in human rights violations: persecution, abuse of power, and cruel treatment. They use a “military logic of fighting the enemy,” he said. “This has translated into more severe and cruel treatment against the migrant population, which has made them opt for alternative routes with a series of risks. Let’s say that it’s not that the armed forces directly causes the drownings, but it is a factor that indirectly influences them,” he said.

The post Drownings and Deterrence in the Rio Grande appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Ahead of the US election in November 2024, Homan and his “Border911” team have crisscrossed the United States promoting the conspiracy touted by Donald Trump on the campaign trail – that Democrats have opened up the border with Mexico to undocumented migrants so they can illegally vote in the election for the Democratic party.

Trump has already pledged to give Homan, the architect of his family separation initiative, a role in his administration. “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan vowed in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

In collaboration with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, the Texas Observer, palabra and Puente News Collaborative, Lighthouse Reports took a deep dive into the activities of Homan’s non-profit groups and their members.

Border911’s policy agenda foreshadows Trump’s most extreme immigration proposals, which include mass deportations and deploying troops to the US-Mexico border. The nonprofit has already had an impact in Arizona, where several Border911-backed bills have been introduced.

Despite his background in law enforcement, IRS filings show that Homan’s foundation and his Border911 dark money organization may be skirting federal tax law, according to tax documents and interviews with experts, that prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations from participating in “any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.”

Meanwhile, Border911 associates are securing lucrative border security contracts for themselves or for-profit companies that employ them, documents show.

METHODS

With our media partners, we conducted dozens of interviews with state and federal law enforcement, nonprofit and legal experts, in addition to experts on U.S. elections. (Homan declined to be interviewed for the story). We dug into tax and regulatory filings by Border911, associated organisations and team members at federal and state levels, analysing thousands of pages of public records. We attended Border911 events and reviewed hundreds of videos, speeches, and social media posts for the investigation.

STORYLINES

Before it became its own foundation, Border911 was part of The America Project, an organization founded by prominent advocates of the conspiracy that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump: former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security advisor. For part of 2023, Homan served as CEO of The America Project.

“BORDER911 is a team of operators with decades of experience,” Homan posted on X last November, announcing the launch of the new Border911 nonprofit. “We helped create the most secure border in history. The war on America is going to be won when we band together. … The cavalry is on its way. … The border is our theater of war.”

Homan’s cavalry, who are publicly featured as team members, includes former state and federal law enforcement, some of whom have intelligence backgrounds, including Rodney Scott, former Border Patrol Chief; Derek Maltz, a former Drug Enforcement Agency special agent; Victor Avila, a former agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); Sara Carter, a Fox News contributor; and Jaeson Jones, a former Texas Department of Public Safety captain turned NewsMax correspondent, according to public records and the Border911 Foundation’s website.

Last summer, Maltz, the former DEA special agent, and Jones, the former DPS captain, testified before a congressional committee about the border, identifying themselves only as private citizens and former law enforcement. Jones didn’t mention his Border911 public relations role, his private intelligence company, or the $20,000-30,000 speaker fees he advertises that he charges as a border expert.

Maltz did not disclose his Border911 speaker role or his job with a firm that has earned more than $250 million in federal government security contracts. Maltz is the executive director of government relations for PenLink, Ltd., a tech firm that sells surveillance tools to law enforcement, including software that can track cell phones without a warrant. The tech has been purchased by ICE, the DEA, and Texas DPS, among other agencies.

Rodney Scott, the ex-Border Patrol chief listed on the Border911 team, founded a consulting firm in July 2021—about a month before retiring from the federal government. In May, the Texas Attorney General’s office granted Scott’s firm, Honor Consulting Plus, a $50,000 contract to advise on the state’s lawsuit defending Governor Abbott’s contentious floating buoy barrier on the Rio Grande, part of the governor’s multibillion-dollar militarized immigration enforcement initiative called Operation Lone Star.

The post Border911 appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Over the last decade, millions of refugees fleeing persecution from Taliban rule and the ongoing Syrian civil war have sought refuge in Turkey. The EU deems it unsafe to deport Syrians and Afghans back to their home countries, yet makes Turkey a buffer zone to stop them reaching Europe – in return for billions of euros.

In recent years, with the Turkish economy nosediving and anti-refugee sentiment rising, Turkey has stepped up efforts to deport migrants. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Afghans have been returned from Turkey. This has been made possible by a vast infrastructure of arrest, detention and expulsion – one of the largest migration detention systems in the world – built and funded by the EU.

An investigation by Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with El País, Der Spiegel, Politico, Etilaat Roz, SIRAJ, NRC, L’Espresso and Le Monde, provides an unprecedented look inside this deportation system and how the EU knowingly helped create and sustain it.

 

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We documented €213 million euros in EU funding for the construction and maintenance of around 30 removal centres in Turkey, with a total of nearly €1 billion given to the country to help manage the flow of people across its borders. Some of these funds have been used to expand fingerprinting systems now used to track down and pick up migrants on the streets, and to kit out removal centres with barbed wire and higher walls.

Documents, visual evidence and interviews show that detainees are often denied legal aid and are exposed to unsanitary and overcrowded conditions as well as abuse and even torture. Many are violently coerced into signing documents stating they will voluntarily return to the countries they fled.

We found that the EU is aware that it is funding this abusive system, with its own staff raising alarm about it internally – yet senior officials choose to turn a blind eye.

METHODS

We spoke with over 100 sources, including 37 people who had been detained in 22 different EU-funded removal centres, as well as Turkish, Syrian and Afghan officials and former removal centre staff. Their testimonies about poor conditions, systemic violence and being forced to sign “voluntary” returns documents were supported by an extensive review of visual evidence, court rulings and hundreds of pages of EU documents.

In the most detailed analysis of EU funding for migration management in Turkey to date, we combed through EU and Turkish official reports and briefings, research papers, and procurement and call for tenders documents. We submitted more than 20 freedom of information requests to European Commission agencies, many of which were denied on the grounds that they could harm EU relations with Turkey.

We talked to over a dozen European diplomats and officials in both Brussels and Turkey to better understand the level of official awareness of these abuses and issues with EU monitoring mechanisms meant to provide oversight over how EU funds are used.

We also captured images of EU-funded equipment being used by Turkish officials to conduct mass arrests targeting refugees on the streets of Turkey and transport refugees back to Syria, and traced the equipment in internal EU documents to try to establish their original purpose.

STORYLINES

Abdul Eyse, 28, had been living legally in Turkey for four years when he was detained on the street, imprisoned in an EU-funded centre and violently forced to sign a “voluntary return” paper. Shortly after, he was driven to Syria in a bus with the EU flag emblazoned on it, and left there.

“I was going to buy household supplies when the Turkish police arrested me,” says Abdul. “In prison, we were severely tortured, beaten and insulted, they also detained us in a refrigerator for up to 12 hours. They forced us to sign voluntary deportation papers.”

He had left Syria in 2019 after being injured in a shelling and was living in Turkey with his wife and four-year-old son, who suffers from a heart condition. Unable to support themselves in Turkey without him, they were forced to join him in Syria.

The family is now living in the Syrian province of Idlib, which is controlled by a group the EU deems “terrorist” and where medical care is severely lacking. Ahmad is unable to get a much-needed operation that could save his life.

In some cases, the consequences of being deported from Turkey are fatal. Jamshid*, a father-of-one, served as a member of the Afghan special forces. When the Taliban advanced on Kabul, he fled from Afghanistan and reached Turkey in the summer of 2023.

He was arrested a month later and deported first to Iran, and then to Afghanistan, according to two of his relatives. Weeks later, he was shot dead, with gunshot wounds to the neck and head.

Several European diplomats told us they raised concerns about the EU funding abuses and deportations to senior officials but were ignored. Seven European diplomats in Turkey, who work for the EU or its members, stated that they were aware of forced deportations of Syrians and/or the appalling conditions inside the centres. These issues were “systematically erased” from the EU’s annual reports on Turkey, according to a former EU official. “Everybody knows. People are closing their eyes,” they said.

“European leaders are fully aware of what is going on, they just don’t want to get their hands dirty,” said Emma Sinclair of Human Rights Watch, referring to the forced deportations carried out by Turkey and facilitated with EU money. “The EU is indirectly facilitating forced returns. They subcontract human rights violations to third countries.”

*Name changed for security reasons

This investigation was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe and the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund

The post Turkey’s EU-funded deportation machine appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

In a year-long investigation with the Washington Post, Enass, Der Spiegel, El Pais, IrpiMedia, ARD, Inkyfada and Le Monde, we reveal that Europe knowingly funds, and in some instances is directly involved in systematic racial profiling detention and expulsion of Black communities across at least three North African countries.

Our findings show that in Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, refugees and migrant workers, some of whom were on their way towards Europe, as well as people who had legal status and established livelihoods in these countries, are apprehended based on the colour of their skin, loaded onto buses and driven to the middle of nowhere, often arid desert areas.

There, they are left without any assistance, water or food, leaving them at risk of kidnapping, extortion, torture, sexual violence, and, in the worst instances, death. Others are taken to border areas where they are reportedly sold by the authorities to human traffickers and gangs who torture them for ransom.

This investigation amounts to the most comprehensive attempt yet to document European knowledge and involvement with anti-migrant, racially motivated operations in North Africa. It exposes how not only has this system of mass displacement and abuse been known about in Brussels for years, but that it is run thanks to money, vehicles, equipment, intelligence and security forces provided by the EU and European countries.

METHODS

The team interviewed more than 50 survivors of these expulsions across Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia – all of whom were from Sub-Saharan or West African countries – which helped us to recognise the systematic and racially-motivated nature of the practices. Some survivors supplied visual material and/or location data from their journey, which we were able to geolocate to support their accounts and map out what happened.

As well as visual material supplied by survivors, we used open source methods to find videos posted on social media purporting to show dumps taking place. We sought to geolocate and verify these cases. In the case of Tunisia, we were able to verify 13 incidents that occurred between July 2023 and May 2024 in which groups of Black people were rounded up in cities or at ports and driven many miles away, usually close to the Libyan or Algerian borders, and dumped, as well as one incident of a group being handed over to Libyan security forces and then incarcerated in a detention centre.

Where visual evidence of the operations wasn’t available online, we documented it through ground reporting. In Morocco we followed the paramilitaries of the Auxiliary Forces and filmed them picking up Black people from the streets three times over three days in the capital, Rabat. We also filmed people being detained in local government buildings before being loaded onto unmarked buses and taken to remote areas.

In Mauritania we used similar techniques by observing a detention centre in the capital Nouakchott. We witnessed and filmed refugees and migrants being brought to the centre in a large truck and Spanish police officers entering the detention centre on a regular basis. We filmed a white bus with migrants in it leaving the detention centre towards the border with Mali, an active warzone.

By speaking with current and former EU staff members, as well as sources within national police forces and international organisations with a presence in the countries where the dumps are taking place, we established that the EU is well aware of the dump operations and sometimes directly involved.

European officials have expressed concern over escalating operations in the region against sub-Saharan African migrants, and consistently denied that funds are being used to violate basic rights. But two senior EU sources said it was “impossible” to fully account for the way in which European funding was ultimately used.

One consultant who worked on projects funded by the EU Trust Fund, under which the EU has given Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco more than €400m for migration management in recent years, said of the aims of the fund: “You have to make migrants’ lives difficult. Complicate their lives. If you leave a migrant from Guinea in the Sahara [in Morocco] twice, the third time he will ask you to voluntarily bring him back home.”

Using freedom of information laws, we were able to obtain a number of internal documents, including one from the EU’s border agency Frontex from earlier this year stating that Morocco was racially profiling and forcibly relocating mainly Black migrants. We also unearthed hard-to-find publicly available documents showing that EU officials have held internal discussions on some of the abusive practices since at least 2019. They also revealed that the EU is directly funding the Moroccan paramilitary auxiliary forces, who we filmed rounding up people with black skin in the capital.

Crucially, we were able to match vehicles used during the round-up and expulsions to vehicles provided by European countries by identifying tenders and carrying out visual analyses. For example in Tunisia, the Nissan vehicles we observed being used by the National Police in raids to arrest migrants before they are driven to desert areas match in make and model with those donated to Tunisia by Italy and Germany.

We also spoke with analysts and academics who told us the European funding links make the EU accountable for these abuses. “The fact is that European countries do not want to get their hands dirty,” said Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche, a law professor at the University of Lyon and a specialist in human rights and migration. “They don’t want to be held responsible for human rights violations and outsource them to others. I believe that, under international law, they are indeed responsible.”

STORYLINES

Timothy Hucks, a 33-year-old US citizen, was arrested by plainclothes officers a few metres from his home in Rabat in 2019. He recalls how he showed his American driver’s licence and offered to get his passport from his flat, but the officer handcuffed him and shoved him into the back of a white van.

Hucks, who now lives in Spain, recalls being taken to a police station where around 40 Black men were crammed together in a dirty room with broken toilets. The security forces took his fingerprints and a photo of him. They asked questions that sounded like accusations: was he a terrorist? A member of Boko Haram? “It’s difficult to describe how angry I was at that moment,” says Hucks. He was then transported along with the other men to a town about 200km south of Rabat, and abandoned. Eventually, he found a bus to take him back to Rabat.

In another case, Idiatou, a Guinea woman in her twenties, told how she was intercepted at sea while trying to reach the Canary Islands from Mauritania. She was taken to a detention centre in the capital Nouakchott, where Spanish police officers took her photograph before she was forced in a white bus towards the border with Mali. There, in the middle of nowhere, she and 29 other people were sent away. “The Mauritanians chased us like animals,” she recalls. “I was afraid that someone would rape me.” After four days of walking she managed to reach a village and found a driver who took her to a relative in Senegal.

Further east in Tunisia, François, a 38-year-old Cameroonian national, describes how he was intercepted at sea by the Tunisian National Maritime Guard while trying to reach Italy on an overcrowded boat. He was then boarded onto buses with dozens of other sub-Saharan Africans and taken to the desert area near the Algerian border. He was able to hide his phone so it wasn’t confiscated by the police, and he provided us with GPS data and photographs from the journey, enabling us to verify his account.

At the Algerian border, François and the group of around 30 people were abandoned by the Tunisian security forces and ordered to walk towards Algeria. Facing warning shots from the Algerian side, they decided to head back to Tunisia. “There were two pregnant women in the group and a child with a heel infection […] We were thirsty. We began to suffer hallucinations,” he recalls. They walked for nine days, more than 40 kilometres, before finally finding transport to take them back to the Tunisian city of Sfax.

Videos by Jack Sapoch / Lighthouse Reports

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Last year, the UK announced that it would allocate nearly £500m to France over three years to prevent boats from leaving its shores.

The British government has repeatedly pressured France to intercept the boats at sea. France has previously refused on the basis that it would place lives at risk.

But in collaboration with Le Monde, The Observer and Der Spiegel, Lighthouse Reports can reveal that French police officers have carried out so-called “pullbacks” in the Channel, in moves experts say mirror the deadly and illegal tactics used in the Aegean and the Central Mediterranean by the Greek and Libyan coast guards.

We’ve established through sources that the patrol boat used by the French police to carry out at least one of these dangerous manoeuvres was funded by the British.

Meanwhile, over the last two years there has been a sharp increase in the number of drownings in the sea off northern France where most of the pullbacks have taken place.

METHODS

We obtained previously unseen footage, leaked documents and witness testimony showing French police have used aggressive methods to intercept migrant vessels at sea, including circling a small boat, causing waves to flood it; ramming into a small boat while threatening passengers with pepper spray; and puncturing boats while they are already at sea, forcing people to swim back to shore. We were able to geolocate the videos to confirm their veracity.

We showed the videos to a number of maritime experts, UK Border Force officers and French coast guards, who said the tactics would have clearly endangered the lives of those on board and appeared to be illegal. Leaked maritime documents helped us to establish that these types of interceptions at sea are not compatible with French law.

We then obtained an additional crucial piece of evidence: a complaint filed by a coast guard officer to the prosecutor about an incident in which French police officers had ordered a National Society of Sea Rescues (SNSM) crew to puncture a migrant dinghy that had already set sail despite the risk of drowning being “obvious and imminent”.

To find out whether these interceptions were happening on a wider scale, we travelled to Northern France to speak to people on the ground trying to reach the UK in boats. A number of people described having their dinghies slashed by police once they had already set sail.

We were able to link the hundreds of millions of pounds provided by Britain to France with these tactics when sources confirmed that police patrol vessels, including the exact vessel seen in one of the videos, had been bought by the French with funding provided by the British government.

An analysis of data by charity Alarm Phone meanwhile showed a sharp increase in the number of people known to have drowned within the vicinity of the French coastline, where most of the pullbacks we documented took place – with one in 2022 compared to five already this year.

STORYLINES

We met Satinder* from Punjab, a predominantly Sikh region in northern India, in Calais.

Five days earlier, he and two friends had tried to make it to Britain by boat. The dinghy was overcrowded with around 46 people, mainly Indians and Afghans, on board. “We sailed for around 10 minutes at dawn without a hitch in an overloaded boat,” he said. “Then a boat came. It was a gendarmerie boat, they had uniforms. They said: ‘Stop the boat’.

“They went around the boat like in a circle and then they stabbed the boat and left. We had to swim for about 10 minutes […] We nearly died.”

The two friends Satinder was with in the boat gave matching accounts. We spoke to four other people who recounted similar stories on different occasions.

“It reminds me of the Greek and Turkish coast guards,” said French customs coast guard Rémi Vandeplanque.”And that’s shameful for the French. If the police continue to use such tactics, there is likely to be a death at some point.”

*Name changed to protect identity

The post Sink the Boats appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Video en Español

On March 27, 2023, 40 men died in a fire in a locked cell at a temporary migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Another 27 survived but suffered amputations, lung damage, and other consequences that will remain with them for life. It was the worst tragedy in a government-run migrant detention facility in Mexico’s history.

Citing lack of food and water and threats of deportation, the men set their sleeping mats on fire to protest deteriorating conditions at the facility. Survivors and families of the deceased have never received an adequate explanation as to why they or their loved ones were left to suffocate for half an hour as the cell and the building filled with toxic smoke.

The official narrative has centered on the key to the men’s cell. Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said the cell could not be opened because the official with the key was not at the facility when the fire broke out.

But our investigative team’s findings disprove these claims. In a months-long investigation, reconstructing the incident to show for the first time what happened during the crucial moments before, during and after the fire. This evidence reveals that the keys never left the facility.

We also document missing or defective fire extinguishers and blocked exits, one which had been covered completely with a new wall. And in newly discovered audio recorded by CCTV cameras within the facility, a federal immigration agent can be heard telling staff not to open doors during the first crucial minutes of the fire.

Our investigation finds that blocked exits and locked doors doomed the 67 people abandoned in the cell while staff had access to the keys that could have freed them. The findings raise serious questions about the continuing expansion of migrant detention facilities in Mexico as the United States pushes its neighbor to detain more people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

METHODS

To reconstruct the event, Lighthouse Reports and partners, La Verdad in Mexico and El Paso Matters in the US, examined 16 hours of CCTV footage from inside the centre along with previously unheard audio. Additionally, our team analyzed thousands of pages of official documents containing interviews and forensics reports.

Using these sources as reference, we constructed a 3D model of the center to situate the incident reconstruction within a spatial environment. The model was then used to reconstruct the movements of staff and emergency responders as well as
map out the movement and location of keys and fire extinguishers inside the center.

STORYLINES

La Verdad reconstructed the crucial minutes during the fire through confidential interviews, a review of the investigation file, and video analysis, documenting how the National Migration Institute’s temporary shelter for migrants became a death trap for the 67 men abandoned while their mats burned and filled the cell with toxic smoke. Their reporting looks at the quest for justice in the wake of the fire.

El Paso Matters interviewed survivors and documented how they have struggled to rebuild their lives in the US after being admitted under temporary humanitarian parole.

The post Smoke and Lies appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Numerous media and NGO reports have detailed the abuse and violence practised by the Libyan Coast Guard against migrants during sea interception and inside the detention centres they are taken to after being brought back to Libya.

Lighthouse Reports has previously established suspicious patterns of collaboration between EU border agency Frontex and the Libyan Coast Guard, including direct links between Frontex aerial assets spotting boats and their subsequent interception by the coast guard.

Despite the reports of abuse and torture, Frontex has withheld public criticism of the Libyan Coast Guard. And until now, the extent to which Frontex has shared information with the coast guard, and its internal knowledge of the abuse migrants face after they are intercepted, was unknown.

METHODS

Following the publication of Lighthouse investigation Frontex and the Pirate Ship in December, the EU Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) sent a letter to Frontex Executive Director Hans Leijtens questioning the agency’s collaboration with Libyan actors, including militia, in eastern and western Libya.

Lighthouse Reports and Der Spiegel gained access to the director’s response to the LIBE Committee’s questions. The email included all Serious Incident Reports (SIRs) relating to the Libyan Coast Guard.

STORYLINES

The SIRs reveal three incidents of Frontex aerial surveillance assets witnessing Libyan Coast Guard officers beating people in overcrowded boats at sea. In a separate incident, the agency’s surveillance drone recorded a Libyan officer shooting at a wooden boat to force it to stop.

The letter from Leitjens meanwhile reveals that Frontex gave away the location of migrant boats to the Libyan Coast Guard approximately 2,200 times, usually via email, in the last three years – despite being aware of the regular instances of violence they commit.

When confronted with these facts by our team, Frontex said: “The decision to share information about vessels in distress with the Libyan rescue coordination centre, alongside other national centres, is taken with a heavy heart”

The SIRs contain parts of Frontex’s human rights officer’s recommendations for the agency. The measures proposed range from increasing the sharing of coordinates with NGO rescue ships to involving UN agencies in following the fates of those returned to Libya. Frontex did not comment on whether these recommendations were implemented.

The post 2,200 Frontex emails to Libya appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.