Algeria has abandoned 13,000 migrants in the Sahara Desert

Algeria has abandoned thousands of migrants in the Sahara desert over the past year, forcing them to walk for miles on end until they reach neighboring Niger or Mali, The Associated Press reported Monday.

Migrants are reportedly being rounded up, put into trucks, dropped in the desert, and told to walk across the border, sometimes at gunpoint. The International Organization for Migration estimates that about 13,000 people have been forcibly expelled from Algeria this way since May 2017.

The number of migrants sent out of Algeria has spiked from 9,290 in 2016 to 14,446 over the past 10 months, reports AP. Officials are increasingly expelling migrants through the deadly Sahara, including pregnant women and children. Algerian police are leaving truckloads of people in scorching temperatures around 115 degrees Fahrenheit at points that are 18 miles from a water source, and migrants report that dozens in their groups succumbed to the inhospitable conditions.

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"There were people who couldn't take it. They sat down and we left them. They were suffering too much," Aliou Kande, an 18-year-old from Senegal, told AP. Janet Kamara, a Liberian who was pregnant when she was stranded in the Sahara, said she spent several days walking before giving birth to a stillborn baby while in the desert. "Women were lying dead," she said. "Other people got missing in the desert because they didn't know the way." Read more at The Associated Press.