Undercover Documentary Exposes the Taxpayer-Funded Pipeline Moving Illegal Immigrants From Africa Into Europe

A UN migration worker admits Spain won't stop the boats because the EU money is too good. A Catholic NGO pulling in €225 million a year moves arrivals to the mainland and pays them to stay. Activists paint a trail to the French border. And the journalists who filmed it were attacked and nearly arrested.

Investigative outlet Muckraker spent two months following the West African migration route from start to finish: from the smuggling hub of Nouadhibou, Mauritania, to Spain's Canary Islands, across mainland Spain and France, and finally to the English Channel and the United Kingdom. The result is a new documentary, REPLACING EUROPE.

The film's central finding is that the movement of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants into Europe is not chaos. It is a managed system, run by smugglers, publicly funded NGOs, activist networks and governments, several of which admit on camera that they profit from it.

Watch the full documentary: https://youtu.be/svJUbYFCRPc

Among the documentary's findings:

• A worker for the UN's International Organization for Migration says Spain deliberately lets the boats keep coming so it keeps receiving EU money.
• ACCEM, a Catholic NGO that took in about €225 million in 2024, mostly from the Spanish state, moves arrivals from the Canary Islands to the mainland, houses them in camps and pays them a monthly allowance.
• Migrants are flown by the hundreds from Gran Canaria to Madrid.
• In the Spanish border town of Irun, an activist group has painted a trail of footsteps guiding migrants past police and into France, where a city-run shelter takes in people with no papers.
• The UN's own migration agency says the priority should be "facilitating, not restricting" migration.

Where It Starts: Mauritania

Most boats on the West African route leave from Senegal, Morocco, Western Sahara and above all Mauritania. Tens of thousands of the illegal immigrants who have landed in the Canary Islands departed from Mauritania's coast.

In Nouadhibou, a local source told Muckraker that young migrant women are raped and held "like slaves," and that captors call their families to demand ransom. Asked whether criminals or police were responsible, he said both: "The police do that… because they are working with the criminals who smuggle people." He added that gun and drug traffickers travel among the migrants to get into Europe.

Muckraker also visited a migrant aid center in Nouadhibou run by OAMR (Organisation d'Appui et d'Assistance aux Migrants et Réfugiés), which works alongside the United Nations International Organization of Migration. A banner on the wall reads "Projet Julia Taft – Phase II": a capacity-building project offering training, outreach and assistance to refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Nouadhibou, with funding listed as "Ambassade des Etats-Unis en Mauritanie" — the U.S. Embassy. Asked whether the United States pays for the center's bakery and computer lab too, staff answered yes.

The Julia Taft Refugee Fund is a State Department program run by the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Created in 2000 and named for Julia Taft, who led that bureau under President Clinton, it lets U.S. embassies hand out small grants directly to local NGOs. The U.S. Embassy in Nouakchott's 2022 call for proposals offered up to $50,000 per project and listed migrants among eligible beneficiaries alongside refugees and returnees.

Arrival: The Canary Islands

Off the island of El Hierro, Muckraker filmed a boat packed with migrants, almost all of them military-aged men, being towed in by Spain's Maritime Rescue Service. One man was carried off on a stretcher, apparently lifeless.

Arrivals are taken to temporary camps. Residents described days with no work ("only eat and sleep") and men who leave to drink and try to come back with knives. A migrant from Senegal described a darker practice on the crossing itself: passengers accused of witchcraft are tied up and thrown into the sea.

The UN Insider: "Migration Is a Game"

On the Canary Islands, Muckraker met Sheikh M. Kromah, who was then working for the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM) and has more than a decade in the migrant aid industry. Kromah has been photographed alongside Spain's Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, Elma Saiz, and local officials on El Hierro.

"The entire migration is a game," Kromah told Muckraker. "Everyone wants to have their share." He said smuggling networks collect between €50,000 and €60,000 per boat.

Asked why Spain doesn't stop the arrivals, he said the government doesn't want to. Every year, he said, Spain receives a huge amount of money from the European Union to manage migration, and if the boats stopped, so would the money. The strategy, in his words, is to "minimize it, but not stop it completely, so that they keep getting the money."

Kromah went further, claiming some of the money changes hands in cash, carried in suitcases into negotiating rooms. He said even the special police deployed to the islands, paid about three times a regular officer's salary, "want the boats to come every day."

"Everybody just wants to make money off everybody here," he said. "So if you look at it, it's a game."

Flown to the Mainland

Then comes the transfer. At Gran Canaria airport, Muckraker found a few hundred African men waiting to be flown to Madrid. This process happens multiple times per week and is managed by ACCEM.

ACCEM: The NGO Running Spain's Migrant Camps

One of the primary organizations responsible for moving illegal immigrants from the Canary Islands to mainland Spain, and housing them in camps once they arrive, is ACCEM.

ACCEM's full name is the Asociación Comisión Católica Española de Migración, the Spanish Catholic Commission for Migration. According to its own 2024 annual report, as reported by Spanish outlet Infovaticana, ACCEM took in about €225 million in 2024, 88% of it from Spain's central government. It employed 3,839 people and managed 9,812 reception places that year.

ACCEM makes no secret of its goals. In 2023, its president, Pilar Samanes Ara, cosigned a letter demanding more "safe and legal routes" for migrants into the European Union and Spain. The letter tied that demand directly to the UN's 2030 Agenda, describing migration as "a transformative force for growth and development."

Outside an ACCEM camp, Muckraker met a man from Senegal who had lived there for almost a year without a job. He said residents receive about €75 a month from ACCEM, plus bus or metro tickets. Even people who leave the camp without documents, he said, still get the money and a ticket. He knew of a friend who left for another Spanish city and kept being paid.

The UN's Blueprint

What Kromah described is consistent with the framework the UN itself has published. In September 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, built around 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

In a related paper titled "Migration and the 2030 Agenda," the IOM states that the agenda recognizes migration as "a core development consideration," the first time migration has been integrated explicitly into the global development agenda. The paper calls migrant women, men and children "agents of development" and says migration can be linked to every goal in the 2030 Agenda. Its conclusion: efforts should not focus on stopping migration. Facilitating it, not restricting it, is the priority.

It is the same framework ACCEM's president invoked when demanding new routes into Europe. The UN sets the agenda, NGOs like ACCEM carry it out, and European taxpayers fund it.

A Painted Trail to France

In Irun, the last Spanish town before France, migrants arrive at the bus station on a daily basis. From the bus station, a trail of painted footsteps leads to the Red Cross and on to the town hall, where an activist group called Irungo Harrera Sarea meets migrants every day. Members of the activist group told Muckraker the group has helped some 40,000 migrants to cross the Spanish border into France.

The man who painted the footsteps told Muckraker the trail exists so migrants can cross the border without being caught by police, and that he plans to paint more "because they get lost." The activists confirmed they tell migrants which buses to take to avoid getting caught. A billboard by the train station maps out the entire route.

The trail leads to Pausa, a shelter in Bayonne, France, that has received millions of euros in public funds. Its director told Muckraker the center is managed by the city of Bayonne's administration and keeps "no photos, no names." Migrants stay a few days, he said, then take the bus and "go all over Europe," with or without documents.

Attacked in Paris

At the entrance to the Eiffel Tower, Muckraker found the plaza crowded with migrant street vendors. When the crew began filming, the vendors surrounded them. Muckraker co-founder Josh Rubin (@joshbrubin) was attacked and left bleeding heavily from the head, for pointing a camera.

A few miles away, Muckraker visited ARDHIS, an NGO that helps migrants seek asylum as LGBT refugees. A migrant who knows the community said many of those making the claim are not gay: "They say that they just want to get on… the help."

Calais and the Channel

For those headed to Britain, the last stop in France is Calais, where makeshift camps serve as staging grounds for Channel crossings. A local private security guard described migrants stealing from stores and killing a farmer's goat to eat. Human traffickers embed themselves in these camps, which have been the scene of deadly shootings in recent years.

Posing as aid workers and filming with hidden cameras, Muckraker got inside one camp set up in an abandoned warehouse. Men there said they came from Sudan, Morocco and Egypt. The crew counted roughly 100 tents packed under one roof, a prayer area lined with rugs and stacked Korans, and masked men watching the visitors. Once the camera was noticed, the mood turned. "I don't accept that you take photos here," one man said. A crowd closed in and pushed the crew out.

The crossings themselves are run by international trafficking networks. Many of the traffickers are illegal migrants themselves, often from Iraq, Albania and Kurdish regions. On the evening before a boat leaves, hundreds of migrants move out of the camps to pre-arranged meeting points along the coast. Muckraker spent weeks in Calais watching these movements and gathering intelligence.

Getting to a launch was the hard part. An Afghan migrant who planned to make the crossing himself told the crew that smugglers are suspicious of anyone who speaks English or French, assuming they are spies or police, and warned they could be beaten, injured or even killed. Late one night, he sent the crew the location where a boat would leave from, followed by a warning to be careful because the smugglers were armed.

The crew drove to the coast and waited. In the dark, they watched a dinghy head out to open water while groups of men they believed could be smugglers moved along the shore. The boat's plan was to circle back and pick up its passengers from the beach.

At about 5 a.m., more than 50 people ran out of the dunes toward the water, including a man carrying a small child. For more than 15 minutes, not a single police officer was on the beach. By the time police arrived, the boat was loading, and they soon gave up and walked back up the beach and the boat they attempted to stop successfully departed for and later arrived at the U.K.

The United Kingdom

In England, asylum seekers living in a government-funded hotel told Muckraker that housing and food are free, that they receive about £300 a month, and that university is free for them as well. One said he had been living in the hotel for three years.

Watch the Full Documentary

From a smuggling hub in Mauritania to a taxpayer-funded hotel in England, every stage of the route has someone paying for it, guiding it or looking the other way. REPLACING EUROPE documents it on camera, step by step.

Watch it here: https://youtu.be/svJUbYFCRPc