Is that accurate? Is that mostly accurate? KELLY: You were able to interview some people who had been detained at Al Mabani who said they felt as though they had been disappeared. You know, even before COVID, violence and murder had been well-documented. You know, the hygienic and health conditions, the dietary conditions in the facilities are horrendous. Typically, the migrants are handled as business opportunities for their captors, and the migrants are squeezed to call home to try to get family or friends to send money. You know, extortion, rape, murder are commonplace in these facilities.

URBINA: The conditions are nothing short of awful. KELLY: What kind of conditions would one find there? It's militia-run and became the location, you know, as of the start of 2021, for thousands of migrants to be held. And it's, you know, a renovated storage depot with a wall of, you know, barbed wire surrounding it. In Arabic, Al Mabani means the buildings. Al Mabani is the largest and most notorious of the migrant prisons. He is imprisoned at one of the secretive prisons for migrants that you went to Libya to document. So he decided to make a similar journey to try to provide for his family. He had several kids, and several of his brothers had already made this journey through the Sahara and had arrived to Spain and Italy and were doing OK for themselves. You know, he farmed cassava, yams and mangoes in a pretty remote section of the country. URBINA: So Aliou was a 28-year-old native of Guinea Bissau, which is in West Africa. KELLY: Who is Aliou Cande, this man whose story anchors your piece? I want you to tell us just a brief snapshot of the life that he led in West Africa and why he would want to leave it. And he tries to trace the journey of one man who ends up in one of those prisons. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Ian Urbina investigates one piece of this - the secret prisons in Libya that keep migrants out of Europe. They keep coming - some on crowded boats, some on tiny rafts - migrants fleeing their homes in the Middle East and Africa, desperate to cross the Mediterranean, desperate to find work, to start a new life in Europe.

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