Inside Algeria's Migration Crackdown

Algeria is one of Africa’s most security-focused states, with a defence budget of around $25 billion—and migration is firmly part of this security agenda. While countries such as Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia have all, to varying degrees, yielded to pressure from the European Union in exchange for economic benefits tied to reducing migration, Algeria has refused to do so, firmly emphasizing its sovereignty and a commitment to 'African solidarity'.

But opacity does not mean inactivity!

Beneath the surface, Algeria has built its own dense system of migration control - a firmly routinized one: patrols, interceptions, arrests and subsequent deportations carried out by the gendarmerie and border forces are recourrent and continous practices.

What is known about this system comes largely from scattered reports by human rights organizations.

Here, numbers remain snapshots rather than a full picture. So I went looking for the traces. This Data Bit is based on a dataset scraped from weekly operational reports published by the Algerian Ministry of Defence. These reports are one of the few official sources that regularly mention migration-related arrests. Using web scraping techniques in R, I collected more than 100 reports spanning 2023 to 2025 and complemented them with older reports hidden in archived local news articles. Together with interviews taken during fieldwork in Tunis in early 2026, this dataset provides a rare longitudinal view of Algeria’s migration enforcement practices.

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"These foreigners in an irregular situation are a source of crime, drugs and several other scourges. We are not telling the authorities to throw these migrants into the sea or beyond the deserts. But staying in Algeria must follow rules. We will not allow the Algerian people to suffer from disorder." - Prime Minister Ouyahyia 2017
"Algeria’s expulsions to Niger are not necessarily new. They have been taking place regularly since 2017, and they also occurred before that, but since 2017 they have happened at a much higher frequency […] People who have been in the country longer know in which months they should not leave the house." - Journalist from Algiers 2023
"In October 2023, to quote a recurrent expression used by people on the move, the sea gate was closed. Indeed, when Tunisia shut its northern borders and a military coup unfolded in Niger, migration routes shifted abruptly—pushing more movement toward Algeria and coinciding with a sharp rise in arrests." - Anthropologist based in Tunis 2026

Official figures are not independently verifiable and must be treated with caution. Governments have incentives to frame enforcement in particular ways. Yet, when triangulated with reporting from organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, as well as the statements of experts from the ground, a concerning picture emerges: Algeria's anti-immigration policies have been significantly hardening since 2022.

These organisations reported on mass expulsions of Sub-Saharan migrants amounting to more than 30,000 per year in 2023 and 2024. In cities like Algiers and Oran, migrants are routinely swept up in large-scale raids and deported to Niger—often under conditions that amount to human rights violations.

"The conditions of arrest, detention, and expulsion carried out by the Algerian government do not respect the fundamental principle of non-refoulement and constitute practices that violate international human rights law and international refugee law," explains Jamal Mrrouch, head of mission for MSF in Niger.

The country's refusal to cooperate with the EU does not mean it resists the broader trend toward restrictive migration governance—this stands in contrast to its claim of African solidarity. Even without formal agreements, Algeria has developed practices that mirror the logic of "Fortress Europe": containment, deterrence, and expulsion, even before the EU began to externalize its borders.