ALGERIAN authorities rounded up more than 1,800 people and left them at the Nigerien border in a record expulsion earlier this month, a Niger-based migrant rights group said on Thursday.

Alarmphone Sahara, which monitors migration across the region, said that the migrants were bused to a remote desert area known as Point Zero after being apprehended in Algerian cities.

Abdou Aziz Chehou, the group’s national co-ordinator, told reporters on Thursday that 1,845 people without legal status in Algeria had been counted, arriving in Niger’s border town of Assamaka after the April 19 mass expulsion.