Italy’s migrant jails are squalid and chaotic. A young man from Guinea was desperate to escape
It was still dark and quiet outside when Ousmane Sylla walked up to the railings of the Italian migrant prison on Feb. 4.
A few moments later, the silence of dawn was shattered. Chaos took over the detention and deportation center of Ponte Galeria on the outskirts of Rome. The 21-year-old Guinean had been found dead in an apparent suicide.
Sylla had landed without a visa on Italian shores the year before and had received an expulsion order after later admitting that he had lied about being a minor upon arrival.
“I miss my Africa very much and my mother too,” read a scribble in French on the wall next to his body. “May I rest in peace.”
Fellow detainees who discovered his body screamed for help and frantically tried to resuscitate him. When paramedics finally arrived, Sylla was gone. Enraged by his death, migrants set mattresses on fire, broke down doors and threw stones at security forces inside the prison. The riots led to the arrest of 13 people.
Sylla’s death and the ensuing commotion have shined a spotlight on the conditions inside these de-facto prisons for the deportation of migrants to their countries of origin, raising questions about Italy’s migration policy as its government, led by far-right Premier Giorgia Meloni, vowed to build more such facilities across the country as well as abroad.
“I want to send a clear message to those who want to enter Italy illegally ... it is better you don’t do it and you don’t put your life in the hands of smugglers,” Meloni said in a video posted on social media last year addressing would-be migrants. “And in any case, if you enter Italy illegally you will be detained and repatriated”.
The detention and deportation prisons, known by their Italian acronym as CPRs, have been described as “black holes for human rights,” by lawyers and activists but have been defended by the Italian government as essential to deterring migrants like Sylla from crossing the Mediterranean on smuggler’s boats.
The centers are meant to detain those migrants who enter the Italian territory without a visa, are not entitled to apply for asylum and are labeled as “socially dangerous” by law enforcement authorities. Under Italian laws, priority should be given to migrants from countries that have repatriation deals with Italy.
Roughly half of the migrants held in them never get deported from Italy, official statistics show. Earlier this year the Italian government extended the time foreigners can be detained, from 90 days to 18 months.
Sylla had dreamed of a better life in Europe, but after a traumatizing experience through Italian migrant shelters and prisons, he had given up and just wanted to go back home.
“Italian soldiers don’t understand anything other than money,” the message on the wall next to his dead body read.
Yet, in a tragic irony, despite having an expulsion order, Sylla’s chances of being deported were minimal because Guinea has no repatriation agreement with Italy, and even voluntary repatriations are lengthy and bureaucratic. During quick hearings with a judge who confirmed and extended his detention order, Sylla had expressed his will to return to Guinea twice, according to his lawyers. But Sylla’s calls for voluntary repatriation fell on deaf ears and he became trapped in a legal limbo.
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FROM CONAKRY TO ROME
Sylla’s journey from the West African nation of Guinea to Italy began in 2022. One of 7 children, he dropped out of school during the COVID-19 pandemic after his family could no longer afford his fees. He learned masonry but his real passion was singing. Sylla posted videos of himself on TikTok rhyming and gesturing his hands like a rapper.
His dream was to become a big star, that everyone would say his name, and he would sing for everyone.
Sylla’s family in Guinea learned of his death via a Facebook post 10 days later. They hadn’t had any news of him in months and though they had been worried, news of his suicide came as a shock.
“We were never informed he was in a detention center. Never. That’s not normal,” his sister said. “He had the right at least to call his family and tell us.”
With no internet or mobile phones allowed, communicating with the outside world was almost impossible for migrants at the Ponte Galeria center. There was only one public phone to be shared by dozens of migrants.
While Sylla had confessed life in Italy wasn’t easy, he had never shown any signs that he was mentally unwell, his family said. Others who were detained with Sylla told AP that in the last months of his life, he stopped talking to people and closed in on himself.
“He was strong. He was brave. He loved our entire family. He can’t do it, he can’t do it. He can’t leave us like that,” Mariama repeated in despair.
To get to Europe, Sylla trekked across the Sahara through Mali, Algeria and Tunisia, always calling his mother and sister to keep them updated on his journey. They sometimes sent him a little money when they could but Sylla also worked small jobs to pay smugglers along the way.
After nearly drowning in the Mediterranean, Sylla finally reached the Italian island of Lampedusa on July 29, 2023. Again, he called his family to tell them he had made it.
But while he had survived the deadliest migration crossing in the world, his odyssey through the Italian migration and asylum system was only beginning.
TRAPPED IN ITALY
Hoping to rejoin his older brother who lives in France, Sylla reached the border town of Ventimiglia on August 9, 2023, only to be rejected by French authorities. After lying about his age in the hopes it would increase his chance of getting residency, Sylla was sent south, to a center for underage migrants in the town of Cassino.
But the place that was supposed to look after unaccompanied minors was violent and dysfunctional for Sylla, his brother and witnesses told AP. During his time in Cassino, Sylla told them he was repeatedly beaten up by other migrants and mistreated by the center’s manager. He sometimes sought shelter with neighbors who told AP that police were frequently called in to resolve scuffles.
According to witnesses working at the center, the facility was lacking basic services such as proper clothing, psychological support and translators. Food deliveries, pocket money and mobile data cards were often missing, creating tensions among the young residents.
“All I know is that the last conversations I had with my little brother, he told me he was in danger and that he was surrounded by really bad people and that they wanted to hurt him,” Sylla’s brother Djibril Sylla told AP in Rome, where he traveled to identify Sylla’s body. That was the last audio message he received from his brother was on Sept. 27.
In audio messages sent to employees that were obtained by AP, the Cassino center’s director, Rossella Compagna, insulted the facility’s residents and threatened to punish them or throw them out into the street. “They are a hassle, but we need them for our economic balance,” she said.
The center has since been shut down under an administrative investigation into its permits. Lawyers of Compagna, the director when Sylla was interned, said XXXXX/declined to speak to the AP.
Desperate for help, Sylla attended a local municipal council meeting on Oct. 6 where the young man repeatedly raised his hand for a chance to speak but was never given the floor. After the meeting, he eventually caught the attention of local councilor Laura Borraccio.
“He lifted his shirt and actually had some bruises,” Borraccio, recalled. “I asked him what those bruises were and he replied that they had been from daily arguments that happened within the center with other guests.”
She said Sylla, who was very agitated but not violent, showed her videos of screaming inside the center and admitted he was not a minor and was desperate to be transferred elsewhere.
“He was very upset and the only thing he said was ‘help me’.....’Please I want to go back to my country’...He said there were bad people in Italy and didn’t want to stay here any longer,’” Borraccio recalled.
MENTAL HEALTH DECLINE
A few days later on Oct. 13, Sylla received an expulsion order. One day later, he was transferred to a detention and deportation center in Trapani, the first of two migrant prisons where he would spend the last four months of his life, according to Dario Asta, a lawyer who assisted Sylla.
Giuseppe Caradonna, another lawyer who tried to assist Sylla, said that’s when his mental health issues were first officially flagged by a psychologist.
Caradonna informed local authorities on Nov. 14 that Sylla’s mental and physical conditions meant he was unfit for detention and requested his transfer to a facility where he could receive adequate medical and psychological attention.
“Ousmane Sylla continues to maintain a conduct that is completely incompatible with the conditions of the center, probably due to mental disorders resulting from traumatic experiences to the point of putting him at serious risk,” Caradonna wrote in his communication, which included a psychologist’s report describing Sylla’s “aggressive behaviour, both against the host facility and other guests”.
But Sylla’s lawyer request was denied and on Jan. 5 his detention was extended by a judge for three more months.
“I don’t understand why nobody told him to apply for asylum in Cassino”, regretted Gaetano Pasqualino, the lawyer who is now representing Sylla’s family. “The application would have prevented him from being detained and would have given him more time.”
A fellow migrant detainee from Guinea-Bissau said that Sylla was under daily medication provided by a doctor at the Trapani facility. In late January, when a riot broke out in the center, burning most of it, both of them were transferred to the Ponte Galeria detention center near Rome.
As Sylla boarded the bus that would transfer him, a doctor handed him his case file, urging him to show it to staff at the new prison so he could get proper care.
“She kissed Ousmane on the head and told him ‘Everything will be fine,’” the Guinean man told AP under the condition that his name not be published over concerns about his legal status.
But there is no confirmation that the file was ever seen by any professional at the Rome detention center and Sylla refused to see the center’s psychologist.
Four days later, the young man took his own life.
DETENTION AND DEPORTATION CENTERS
Enclosed by tall metal bars, detainees at the Ponte Galeria detention and deportation center near Rome, where Sylla died, walk around in circles and kick balls to pass time. Their days are cadenced only by breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as a few medical appointments and sporadic detention validation hearings. Unlike normal prisons where inmates can work, learn and do other activities while they serve their sentences, in Italy’s these temporary migrant prisons there’s only boredom.
“There’s nothing to do there: you just wake up, eat, go to sleep, day after day….People accumulate lots of rage, lose their minds, because they have no hope left,” said another former detainee from Tunisia.
There’s nothing to do there: you just wake up, eat, go to sleep, day after day….People accumulate lots of rage, lose their minds, because they have no hope left.
Like many other detainees who spoke to AP, he asked to remain anonymous fearing repercussions on his application to stay in Italy.
Some of them described how many migrants hurt themselves in a desperate attempt to get evacuated from the centers. Videos from inside the center reviewed by AP showed some of those self-harm attempts, including two detainees using an iron bar to break the ankle of another resident with his permission amid screaming loud enough to be heard through the cavernous facility.
“We call it the lawyer”, said the Tunisian man about the iron bar.
Although the Ponte Galeria center’s management allowed AP a rare visit to the facilities, they declined to answer specific questions about the conditions of the residents and Sylla’s time there.
Italy currently has 10 such migrant prisons across the country with a capacity to hold 700 foreigners under administrative detention at any one time. Two of them, including Trapani’s, are currently closed for upgrades.
In theory, the aim of the centers is deportation. But according to Interior Ministry data, only 52% of migrants in detention centers are successfully expelled. The rest are eventually released back into the streets with a self-expulsion order, unable to work or regularize their situation. Many fall into the underground economy or become prey to criminal groups.
“The (detention and deportation) system is a catalyst for failures,” said Maurizio Veglio, a migration law expert active with the Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration, an advocacy group.
“That’s because the final outcome of the repatriation process depends mainly on the will of the migrants’ country of origin to cooperate with Italy. And, often, their decisions are based on all different kinds of political reasons, which have nothing to do with the behavior of the detainees,” he added.
Rights groups and human rights lawyers have for years denounced and documented squalid conditions inside the migrant prisons, including the lack of adequate health services, abuse of psychiatric drugs and the very limited access that detainees have to their lawyers and relatives.
Demonstrators hold signs with the name of Ousmane Sylla, as they ask for the closure of all the facilities created in Italy to detain migrants in Milan. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Demonstrators hold signs with the name of Ousmane Sylla, as they ask for the closure of all the facilities created in Italy to detain migrants in Milan. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
From 2018 to 2022, 14 people — with an average age of 33 — had died inside Italy’s CPRs, which also registered hundreds of suicide attempts and self-harm episodes, according to a 2023 report by the NAGA volunteers’ association that provides health, social and legal support to migrants.
“We tried to give an identity to these deaths, but five out of 14 died without a name,” NAGA activists wrote in the report.
DOUBLING DOWN ON MIGRANTS’ DETENTION
Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has insisted that the expansion of the network of deportation centers is a “fundamental element” in the government’s overall migration strategy, stressing that the difficult conditions in them are the result of riots and vandalism by detainees.
“There is no intention to deny any human rights, but in these centers are people who (...) present conditions of danger that have been confirmed by judicial authorities,” said Piantedosi, who has defended the migrant detention centers’ effectiveness in increasing deportations of migrants who are denied permission to stay, whose track is otherwise lost in Italy or as they seek to move further north to other European countries.
Italy is also trying to outsource migration to third countries. Last year, the government signed a deal with Albania for the non-EU country to hold thousands of asylum seekers on behalf of Italy. Under the five-year deal, Albania would shelter migrants rescued from international waters who would normally be taken to Italian ports and process their asylum requests there. Those eligible would be transferred to Italy and those rejected would be deported directly from Albania.
There is no intention to deny any human rights, but in these centers are people who present conditions of danger that have been confirmed by judicial authorities.
How the system will be implemented in reality remains unclear and the construction of the centers in Albania is undergoing major delays.
But the novel approach has awakened the curiosity of a majority of other European Union member states who called for similar arrangements earlier this month. The bloc’s new Migration and Asylum Pact also strives to speed up asylum procedures and deportations of those not eligible to stay in the EU.
With parliamentary elections in the bloc approaching in June, many right-to-center politicians are also eager to adopt a tough stance on the issue for fear of losing even more votes to the likes of Meloni and other populists with an anti-migrant rhetoric.
Currently, only a third of migrants with an expulsion order are successfully deported across the bloc, with Italy having one of the lowest rates of forced returns: 12% of all of those with expulsion orders in 2023.
“This system is a total failure. Often it doesn’t reach its goal, which is to repatriate as many migrants as possible, while keeping young people in limbo, without any respect for their human rights,” said Lazio Guarantor for detainees’ rights, Stefano Anastasia.
MOURNING IN CONAKRY
Back in Guinea, Sylla’s relatives blame the Italian government for his death.
“I am so, so angry at them! What they’ve done to my little brother, they abandoned him like he’s not a human being. I’m furious,” Mariama told AP shortly after his burial in Conakry.
She vowed the family would fight for justice with the help of an Italian lawyer. Their hopes are pinned on the ongoing official probe looking into possible “incitement to suicide and manslaughter,” according to Attilio Pisano, one of the Rome prosecutors on the case. To date, there have been no indictments.
If I die, I’d like my body to be sent back to Africa.
“If I die, I’d like my body to be sent back to Africa,” Sylla had written on the prison wall. “My mother will be happy.”
On April 8 his final wish was accomplished. Paid by crowdfunding from activists, Sylla’s body was flown from Rome to Conakry in a metal coffin. That evening, dozens of relatives and friends chanting “justice” with their fists in the air marched to the airport to receive his remains.
Following Islamic tradition, they removed his remains from the casket and buried him next to his father’s grave the next day. It was Ramadan, just like when he had left, only two years before.
Sylla’s house was then flooded by family and neighbors who came to give his teary-eyed mother Mariam Bangoura their heartfelt condolences. Surrounded by other women from her community, Bangoura wiped tears from her eyes and looked at photos of her son on a cell phone.
“My child was suffering and I didn’t know,” she said.
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CREDITS
Reporting: Paolo Santalucia, Giada Zampano, Annie Risemberg and Boubacar Diallo
Visuals: Misper Apawu, Paolo Santalucia, Andrew Medichini, Luca Bruno, Annie Risemberg
Editors: Anna Jo Bratton, Renata Brito, Aritz Parra, Enric Martí
Visual Editing: Bram Janssen, Maria Grazia Murru, Nat Castañeda
Presentation: Nat Castañeda
Audience + Social: Pavan Mahal, Casey Silvestri
