Police upscaled their crackdown on migrants in Tarfaya, a small fishing town south of Morocco, making over 300 arrests this week in a bid to stop migration flows in the deadly Atlantic.
105 sub-Saharan were intercepted on Wednesday, said a statement by local authorities in Tarfaya, carried by MAP. A previous statement said police arrested 200 migrants on Monday in the town wedging the Atlantic and the Sahara, a popular point of embarkment to the Atlantic.
“The strengthening of control operations in the region of Laayoune-Sakia El Hamra enabled to abort dozens of illegal immigration attempts and led to the arrest of hundreds of would-be illegal immigrants,” said the MAP statement.
Since it picked up pace in 2020, the Atlantic route drew in more people who are leaving from West Africa and Morocco’s Atlantic coast for the Canary Islands than it did in the last 13 years.
4,016 migrants, from 21 different nationalities either died or have gone missing, according to a recent report by Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras.
94.80% of those victims have disappeared without having their bodies found, according to the report.
Last year, a total of 83 boats were wrecked. A total of 628 women and 205 children died in these attempts, added the NGO.
“A tragedy of international dimensions,” exacerbated by Spanish migration policy and Spanish-Moroccan political tension, said Caminando Fronteras in a series of tweets.
“Migration control policies have exponentially increased mortality at our borders,” the NGO stated, adding further that, “the Spanish-Moroccan crisis has further increased the deficiencies of the rescue protocols,” causing the lives of entire families to be put in danger.
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