According to an immigration official and UN sources, Libyan authorities deported around 150 Nigerian women and children on Tuesday as part of a “voluntary return” program for irregular migrants that is associated with the UN.

Libya serves as a major entry point for migrants from various parts of Africa who brave perilous maritime journeys to reach Europe along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa.

The migrants deported on Tuesday were all Nigerian “women accompanied by children,” according to Mohamad Baredaa of Libya’s migration office, who spoke to AFP.

According to sources at the United Nations organization responsible for the repatriation plan, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the group consisted of 17 children and 160 women.

Mostly wearing black tracksuits, they assembled in a waiting area of a detention facility in Tripoli before being transported by bus to the Mitiga airport in the Libyan capital.

Multiple other repatriation planes transporting groups of Bangladeshi, Gambian, and Mali migrants were scheduled to depart this week from Mitiga and an airfield in Benghazi, in the country’s east, according to Baredaa.

Since the ouster and assassination of dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011 in an uprising supported by NATO, Libya has been characterized by violence and instability, which has made the country a haven for human traffickers.

The IOM estimates that there are over 700,000 migrants in Libya. But according to Libyan officials, the real number is significantly higher.

This week, Imad Trabelsi, the interior minister of Libya’s UN-recognized government in Tripoli, suggested that there may be “more than four million migrants” in the nation, although he acknowledged that precise numbers were impossible to determine because many of them had proper documentation.

Trabelsi stated on Monday that the nation “will not bear the burden of illegal immigration alone and will not become a settlement zone” in an attempt to allay Libyans’ fears.

-Deeprows News