Detained, Deported, Abandoned: A note on the situation of migrants in Mauritania

Since February 2025, migrants in Mauritania have been suffering an ordeal. Mostly nationals of the region, they are being arrested and detained in sweep operations on the city's streets, in their cars, and in their homes or workplaces. During these operations, they are asked to present the infamous "residence permit", which has become increasingly elusive in recent years. Those who do not present it find themselves arrested, taken to police stations, detention centers, and finally pushed back at the borders with Senegal or Mali. These raids and arrests have gradually become more violent since they started. At first, there was a tightening of controls by the road police, who began systematically stopping motorcycle taxis in Nouakchott, because this profession is generally practiced by foreign nationals, including Malians, Senegalese, Guineans and others. Generally, they are first asked for the documents of the vehicle. If they are in order with the Code de route, they are then asked for their personal documents, namely the residence permit. However, many have been either unable to obtain a residence permit or possess an expired one.

There have long been significant obstacles to regularization in Mauritania, but it has become especially challenging in this period. Between July and November 2022, the Mauritanian government launched a regularization campaign, inviting migrants in the country to obtain residence permits free of charge at a designated civil registry centre in the capital city. Since then, however, the situation has deteriorated. In the immediate aftermath of the regularization campaign, the government viewed anyone without a permit to be deportable, since they had apparently not availed of the regularization opportunity. More recently, many have been left waiting long periods for their card to be issued after applying. For others, the procedure was ultimately pointless, as they were never issued with a permit. Nationals of countries that do not require a visa to enter Mauritania – such as Niger, Mali, Senegal and several others – have the legal possibility of staying 90 days in the country before being required to obtain a residence permit. In practice, however, these rights are violated because people are arrested arbitrarily and taken in large groups to police stations, before being transferred to detention centers and transported to the borders between Mali and Mauritania or Senegal and Mauritania. These practices have caused widespread confusion, frustration, and trauma.

In March 2025, the situation worsened with raids on homes, especially in neighborhoods of Nouakchott that are generally home to foreign nationals, such as Quartier Cinquième or “Carrefour Sebkha”. Arrests also continued across sectors that are primarily occupied by foreign nationals, such as construction, electricity, plumbing, painting, etc. At times, police forced their way into homes and arrested people. In these cases, families are often separated, and businesses closed. After a while, information gained momentum as migrant communities, faced with the distress of this situation, began calling for help through social media and contacting their diplomatic missions in Mauritania. Unfortunately, the responses of the various authorities were not, and still are not, commensurate with the gravity of the situation. Both the Malian and Senegalese governments have issued statements of condemnation of the deportation campaign, but this timid reaction from governments did not stop the abuses, and the inaction and lack of pragmatism of the respective states of these nationals has only given the Mauritanian authorities free rein to continue the campaign. For their part, local human rights organizations have condemned the campaign, and migrant community associations have intervened on behalf of their compatriots, but to little avail.

As a result of the deportation campaign, the situation at the borders has become alarming. By late April 2025, a humanitarian crisis was threatening to emerge at the Mauritania-Senegal border in Rosso, where hundreds, including women and minors, had been pushed back. Some were accommodated by the Red Cross in Rosso, but the organization’s capacity had already been reached by early March. The harsh conditions of this environment, involving a lack of food and sanitation, have opened up room for exploitation and abuse of vulnerable groups. Among these returned people are also people with refugee status and others holding asylum application documents. Similarly, on the border with Mali, the situation in Kayes has degraded seriously, as vast numbers of people deported from Mauritania found themselves stranded. The Minister for Malians Abroad paid a visit to the region to assess the situation in April 2025, shortly after a group of deported migrants lashed out in frustration, attacking and setting fire to a Mauritanian police station at the Gogui border post. Despite these tensions, the campaign appears to have continued into the months of June and July, with reports continuing to emerge of people with refugee documents being detained in Nouakchott.

These practices cannot be separated from the strengthening of Mauritania's cooperation with the EU in recent years on migration issues. According to the Spanish Ministry of Interior, Mauritania was the primary departure point last year for arrivals on the Canary Islands, which reached unprecedented numbers in 2024. Shortly before the start of the expulsions, the President of the Canary Islands visited Mauritania in a diplomatic mission to discuss how to prevent these arrivals. In August 2024, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez paid a visit to Mauritania as part of a diplomatic tour of West Africa, which led to circular migration schemes promised between Spain and a number of West African countries of ‘origin.’ Most prominently, the European Commission and the Mauritanian government signed a migration partnership agreement in March 2024, which promised Mauritania €210 million for preventing “irregular migration”, mirroring a now classic neocolonial pattern of the EU externalizing its borders to countries of the South.

In recent years, other states in the region have sought to counter such neocolonial practices, in rhetoric if not always in practice. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger withdrew from the EU-backed G5 Sahel regional security alliance, which was made up of these three states along with Mauritania and Chad. In its place, they set up a parallel security pact in the form of the Alliance d’Etats du Sahel (AES). This has had direct repercussions for migration control cooperation. In Niger, following the July 2023 military coup, the government repealed a 2015 law which criminalized the crossing of the desert by migrants. The law had a negative effect on the local transport industry and resulted in more lethal routes through the Sahara being taken. It also transformed Agadez into a sorting hub and blocking zone for young people on the move. With Niger pushing back against externalization polices, increased efforts have been devoted to Mauritania and the Maghreb countries.

In July 2023, Tunisia sealed access to the Mediterranean in return for political and financial support from the EU. This oriented people’s trajectories toward the Atlantic Route to the Canary Islands from Mauritania, which therefore became the focus of Spain and the EU. As a result of this attention, the Mauritanian government began pressuring EU partners to increase the degree of support to its migration control efforts, stating that it deserved a similar level support to Tunisia. This eventually resulted in the partnership agreement that was signed in March 2024, and in the wave of expulsions that the country is currently witnessing.

In other words, migrants in Mauritania are currently suffering the consequences of a government strategy of leveraging European fears of migration as well as a shifting and unpredictable geopolitical landscape. If the EU wishes to be taken seriously in its proclaimed respect for human rights and the rule of law, it should suspend all such externalization partnerships. This should be a core demand of human rights organizations, social movements, and advocacy groups.