Brussels – The other face of security crackdowns. From deportations in Trump’s US to bloody European agreements with transit countries of prominent migration routes to border violence between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2024 was the deadliest year ever for migrants, with at least 8,938 deaths on migration routes worldwide.
A tally confirms the dramatic trend of the past five years, with the number of deaths steadily rising and exceeding the previous record set in 2023 when the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project recorded 8,747 migrant deaths. On the other hand, as the UN organization report points out, the actual number of deaths and disappearances “is probably much higher” due to the scarcity of official sources and difficulties in finding reliable information in some countries.
“The tragedy of the growing number of migrant deaths worldwide is both unacceptable and preventable. Behind every number is a human being,” said IOM Deputy Director General for Operations Ugochi Daniels. 2024 was the deadliest year for migrants in most regions of the world: in Asia, there were 2,778 fatalities; in Africa, 2,242; on the European continent, particularly in the Western Balkans, in the Alps between Italy and France, and the English Channel, 233. The Mediterranean Sea, where more than 30,000 people drowned in the past decade, became the graveyard of 2,452 migrants in 2024, less than the 3,155 deaths recorded in 2023 but more than the previous two years. In the first three months of 2025, 365 people have already allegedly died attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
“The increase in deaths across so many regions in the world shows why we need an international, holistic response that can prevent further tragic loss of life,” Daniels added. Final figures are not yet available for the Americas, but at least 1,233 deaths were recorded in 2024. That includes an unprecedented number in the Caribbean, where 341 people lost their lives and at least 174 fatalities in the jungle crossing in the Darién, a region between Colombia and Panama that for the past few years has been a mandatory stop for the hundreds of thousands of migrants trying to reach the United States by land.
There is another chilling truth that emerges from IOM’s annual report: worldwide, migrants mostly die because they were killed. As of 2022, at least 10 percent of all recorded migrant deaths occurred because of violence. According to data from the Missing Migrants Project, in 2024, this was mainly due to killings on the route from South and Southeast Asia through Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran to Turkey, where nearly 600 people lost their lives. However, arbitrary violence against migrants is also increasing on the African continent, particularly in those countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea -Tunisia and Libya – from which thousands of sub-Saharan migrants seek to sail to the Italian, Greek, and Maltese coasts.
Throughout 2024, several international media outlets, non-governmental organizations, and even the European Ombudsman and the EU Court of Auditors have highlighted the risk that this violence and killing is also being perpetrated with the support of the substantial European funds that the Commission makes available to the Tunisian and Libyan security forces to stop the migrant flows.
Scrolling through the incidents recorded in the IOM report, one can count the casualties up to a few days ago. There were 70 missing in the waters between Mauritania, Morocco, and the Spanish Canary Islands on March 12. There are the bodies of 58 migrants discovered February 7 in two mass graves in Libya, in the Sahara Desert, in the Al Kufrah district. And thousands more that may never become names. While “the increase in deaths is terrible in itself, the fact that thousands remain unidentified each year is even more tragic,” commented Julia Black, coordinator of the Missing Migrants Project.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
