Christian and David, two Nigerians, cling to the back of a pick-up truck racing across the Sahara, part of the migration route that hundreds of thousands have taken from West Africa toward the Libyan coast. This DW investigation follows migrants through the most dangerous stretch of the journey, tracking how EU funding for border management in Sahara and Sahel countries has turned local security forces into proxies for stopping people before they reach Europe. In regions with little functioning governance, that policy leaves migrants exposed to smuggling networks, traffickers, and armed groups who operate with near-total impunity. Reporters trace the money behind these migration partnerships and interview people who survived torture, imprisonment, and deportation attempts along the way. The film treats the Mediterranean crossing as only the final risk in a chain of dangers that starts hundreds of miles inland, and asks what Europe's outsourced border policy actually costs the people trying to cross it.