Algeria has pushed back more than 16,000 irregular African migrants to Niger since April, the figure comprising more than half total expulsions for last year, an official source told AFP Wednesday.

Irregular migrants from neighbouring Niger and other African countries have regularly been pushed back over the past decade from Algeria, a transit point to Europe.

On June 1 and 2, a total of 1,466 migrants arrived at the border town of Assamaka according to prefectorial authorities of the northern Nigerien city of Arlit.

The first group, which arrived on Sunday, included 688 nationals from a dozen West African countries, including 239 Nigeriens, authorities said.

The second group, which included 778 Nigeriens, 222 of them minors, arrived Monday on board 13 trucks and a van, they added.

May saw Algiers expel 8,086 migrants — 5,287 Nigeriens and 2,799 other Africans, according to an official count.

April had seen another 6,737 turned back.

Those two months of expulsions account for more than half of the 31,000 migrants which Algiers kicked out in total in 2024, often in “brutal conditions,” according to local NGO Alarm Phone Sahara.

The group recently demanded “the immediate halt of round-ups and mass expulsions” by Algeria, saying migrants’ rights were being violated.

In mid-May, Nigerien authorities announced plans to repatriate some 4,000 migrants to their home countries by July to avoid “a humanitarian disaster” in the country’s north, stepping up a regular repatriation operation by the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM).

General Mohamed Toumba, interior minister in Niger’s military government, had declared the pushback was disrupting his country’s “security balance”.

In November 2023, the junta had repealed a 2015 law criminalising migrant trafficking.