40 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
diary, two pairs of pants, two T-shirts,
and six hundred euros. “I don’t know
how long this will take,” he told his
wife that morning. “But I love you, and
I’ll be back.”
Candé worked his way across Cen-
tral Africa, hitching rides in cars or
stowing away on buses until he reached
Agadez, Niger, once called the Gate-
way to the Sahara. Historically, the bor-
ders of many Central African countries
have been open, as in the E.U., though
the arrangement was less formalized.
In 2015, however, E.U. officials pres-
sured Niger to adopt a statute called
Law 36: overnight, bus drivers and
guides, who for many years had carried
migrants north, were declared human
traffickers and subject to thirty-year
prison sentences. Migrants were forced
to consider more perilous routes. Candé,
along with a half-dozen others, struck
out through the Sahara, sometimes
sleeping in the sand on the side of the
road. “Heat and dust, it’s terrible here,”
Candé told Jacaria, by phone. He
sneaked through a portion of Algeria
controlled by bandits. “They will cap-
ture you and beat you until you’re re-
leased,” he told his family. “That’s all
that’s there.”
In January, 2020, he arrived in Mo-
rocco, and learned that passage to Spain
cost three thousand euros. Jacaria urged
him to turn back, but Candé said, “You
have worked hard in Europe. You sent
money to the family. Now it’s my turn.”
He heard that, in Libya, he could book
a cheaper boat to Italy. He arrived in
Tripoli last December, and stayed in a
migrant slum called Gargaresh. His
great-uncle Demba Balde, a forty-year-
old former tailor, had lived undocu-
mented in Libya for years, doing var-
ious jobs. Balde found Candé work
painting houses and pressed him to
abandon his plan to cross the Medi-
terranean. “That’s the route of death,”
Balde told him.
T
his past May, I travelled to Trip-
oli to investigate the system of mi-
grant detention. I had recently started
a nonprofit called the Outlaw Ocean
Project, which reports on human-rights
and environmental issues at sea, and I
brought along a three-person research
team. In Tripoli, the coastline was dot-
ted with half-built offices, hotels, apart-
ment buildings, and schools. Armed
men in fatigues stood at every inter-
section. Almost no Western journalists
are permitted to enter Libya, but, with
the help of an international aid group,
we were granted visas. Shortly after we
arrived, I gave my team tracking de-
vices and encouraged them to put pho-
tocopies of their passports inside their
shoes. We were placed in a hotel near
the city center and assigned a small se-
curity detail.
The Libyan Coast Guard’s name
makes it sound like an official military
organization, but it has no unified com-
mand; it is made up of local patrols that
the U.N. has accused of having links to
militias. (Humanitarian workers call it
the “so-called Libyan Coast Guard.”)
Minniti told the press, in 2017, that build-
ing up the patrols would be a difficult
undertaking: “When we said we had to
relaunch the Libyan Coast Guard, it
seemed like a daydream.” The E.U.’s
Trust Fund has since spent tens of mil-
lions of dollars to turn the Coast Guard
into a formidable proxy force.
In 2018, the Italian government, with
the E.U.’s blessing, helped the Coast
Guard get approval from the U.N. to
extend its jurisdiction nearly a hun-
dred miles off Libya’s coast—far into
international waters, and more than
halfway to Italian shores. The E.U. sup-
plied six speedboats, thirty Toyota Land
Cruisers, radios, satellite phones, in-
flatable dinghies, and five hundred uni-
forms. It spent close to a million dol-
lars last year to build command centers
for the Coast Guard, and provides train-
ing to officers. In a ceremony in Oc-
tober, 2020, E.U. officials and Libyan
commanders unveiled two state-of-
the-art cutters that had been built in
Italy and upgraded with Trust Fund
money. “The refitting of these two ves-
sels has been a prime example of the
constructive coöperation between the
European Union; an E.U. member state,
Italy; and Libya,” Jose Sabadell, the
E.U.’s Ambassador to Libya, said in a
press release.
Perhaps the most valuable help
comes from the E.U.’s border agency,
Frontex, founded in 2004, partly to
guard Europe’s border with Russia. In
2015, Frontex began spearheading what
it called a “systematic effort to capture”
migrants crossing the sea. Today, it hasa budget of more than half a billion
euros and its own uniformed service,
which it can deploy in operations be-
yond the E.U.’s borders. The agency
maintains a near-constant surveillance
of the Mediterranean through drones
and privately chartered aircraft. When
it detects a migrant boat, it sends pho-
tographs and location information to
local government agencies and other
partners in the region—ostensibly to
assist with rescues—but does not typ-
ically inform humanitarian vessels.
A spokesperson for Frontex told me
that the agency “has never engaged in
any direct cooperation with Libyan au-
thorities.” But an investigation by a co-
alition of European news organizations,
including Lighthouse Reports, Der Spie-
gel, Libération, and A.R.D., documented
twenty instances in which, after Fron-
tex surveilled migrants, their boats were
intercepted by the Coast Guard. The
investigation also found evidence that
Frontex sometimes sends the locations
of the migrant boats directly to the
Coast Guard. In a WhatsApp exchange
earlier this year, for example, a Frontex
official wrote to someone identifying
himself as a “captain” in the Libyan
Coast Guard, saying, “Good morning
sir. We have a boat adrift [coördinates].
People poring water. Please acknowl-
edge this message.” Legal experts argue
that these actions violate international
laws against refoulement, or the return
of migrants to unsafe places. Frontex
officials recently sent me the results of
an open-records request I made, which
indicate that from February 1st to Feb-
ruary 5th, around the time that Candé
was at sea, the agency exchanged thirty-
seven e-mails with the Coast Guard.
(Frontex refused to release the content
of the e-mails, saying that it would “put
the lives of migrants in danger.”)
A senior official at Frontex, who re-
quested anonymity out of fear of re-
taliation, told me that the agency also
streams its surveillance footage to the
Italian Coast Guard and Italy’s Mari-
time Rescue Coördination Center,
which, the official believes, notify the
Libyan Coast Guard. (The Italian agen-
cies did not respond to requests for
comment.) The official argued that this
indirect method didn’t insulate the
agency from responsibility: “You pro-
vide that information. You don’t im-