The bus station in Agadez, a remote town of low mud-brick houses in Niger, West Africa, is busy again.

Every week, thousands of migrants from West and Central Africa leave the train station in this gateway city to the Sahara aboard a caravan of pickup trucks and travel for days to North Africa, where many will then attempt to cross the Mediterranean to get to Europe.

For years this portal was at least officially closed. The country’s pro-European government banned emigration from Agadez, and in return the European Union pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Niger’s treasury and the local economy.

But last summer, after generals seized power in a military coup in Niger, the European Union stopped providing financial support to the government – and in response, the generals canceled the migration agreement with the European Union in November. The gate is open again and, to the relief of many locals, a new group of hopeful migrants is passing through again.

“Migration is how we make ends meet,” said Aicha Maman, a single mother who runs a business supporting migrants and served a prison sentence for illegal human trafficking in Agadez last year.

But Niger’s decision has sparked concern among European officials, who fear that the end of the partnership with Niger will prompt many more people to make the treacherous journey north.

The overland route through the Agadez Gate in Niger is seen by many migrants as cheaper and less dangerous than that Marine route in the Atlantic — on rickety boats from the west coast of Africa via the Canary Islands. Although the Niger route was officially closed, migration to Europe in 2022 reached its highest level since 2016.

Migration is once again high on the agenda of several European governments right-wing extremist parties The number of people seeking to expel migrants is increasing months before crucial elections for the European Parliament, one of the European Union’s three main institutions.

Emmanuela Del Re, the European Union’s top diplomat for the African region that includes Niger, said in a recent interview that the Nigerian military junta is hitting back at the European Union for refusing to recognize the junta: “They are using migration as a… Blackmail against the “European Union.”

In Agadez, a desert outpost that has been at the crossroads of trade and migration routes for centuries, thousands of households relied on transporting, housing and selling goods to migrants.

Now that immigration is legal again, opportunities are opening up again: Young men are buying new pickup trucks to drive people north. Entrepreneurs who organized accommodation and transport for migrants were released from prison.

On a recent morning in her mud-brick home, Ms. Maman said she planned to resume her business of housing migrants in houses known locally as “ghettos” and connecting them with drivers – a business she has relied on for years to support their children and their parents.

“We have always viewed migration as an economic activity,” said Mohamed Anacko, the top civilian official in the Agadez region. “It’s not human trafficking, it’s transportation.”

One morning, two men in their 20s were resting in a shelter on the outskirts of Agadez. The men, identified only by their first names to avoid detection by authorities, had arrived days earlier from neighboring Nigeria and purchased the water containers, sunglasses and headscarves necessary for the three-day trip to Libya.

Their trip would have been illegal under Nigeria’s anti-migration law weeks earlier, but now they could go north: One of the men, Abubakar, said he was looking for a construction job in Libya, albeit as a fan of the Real Madrid soccer team, which would eventually represent Spain wanted to achieve. The other, Adamou, said he had his eye on Paris but that any small job in Libya would do for now.

Already, up to a hundred pickup trucks with 30 passengers each leave Agadez every week under military escort to protect them from bandits. Before the Nigerian government repealed the law last year, a few dozen trucks drove off illegally, local authorities and researchers say.

Few people have an incentive to keep the size of these caravans down: When Niger began implementing its anti-migration law in 2016, thousands of locals lost their only source of income. Agadez essentially became a European Union border post, thousands of kilometers from European shores.

Countless people who travel through Niger never attempt to reach Europe. Many work in North African countries for a few years before returning home.

But despite the scars of the 2015 migration crisis, when more than a million people came to Europe, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, the European Union has moved to keep migrants at bay by providing financial support to some key transit countries in exchange for has granted stricter limits controls.

For Niger it was an attractive compromise.

Until last summer’s coup, the European Union had provided nearly $1 billion in bilateral aid to the Nigerian government since 2014, according to official bloc figures, in addition to the hundreds of millions spent by individual European countries.

The European Union also promised to help those who make a living from migration in the Agadez region find new jobs. But local officials in Agadez say the promised funds only benefited about 900 of 6,500 people caught up in the migration business.

“Those who made millions from migration were offered much less,” said Dr. Rhoumour Ahmet Tchilouta, a migration researcher from Agadez, about the millions in local currency, equivalent to thousands of dollars, that some could earn in a month.

Still, more than four million migrants have traveled through Agadez since 2016, according to the UN migration agency.

Those who wanted to leave hid in the “ghetto” houses hidden behind tall metal gates in residential neighborhoods. Or they bypassed the city and escaped police surveillance by taking unknown routes, leading to thousands of deaths or disappearances, according to humanitarian organizations.

“The Sahara is swallowing up countless migrants, just like the Mediterranean,” said Azizou Chehou, the head of Alarm Phone Sahara, a nonprofit that rescues stranded migrants in the desert.

Tens of thousands of others traveled through Agadez in the opposite direction: returning from North Africa after being driven out by militias in Libya or security forces in Algeria. From Agadez, the UN migration agency returns them to their countries of origin with financial help from the European Union.

Agadez has become the crux where the paths of those seeking to reach North Africa cross with those returning to West or Central African countries, and where stories of hope and suffering collide.

One morning last month, in one of these dilapidated houses, a few men from Sierra Leone awaiting repatriation chatted with other migrants from their country who were heading north.

Among them was Mabinty Conteh, 23, with her nine-month-old niece. Ms Conteh said her sister, the baby’s mother, died last year and that her own parents died of Ebola years ago. She wanted to get to Italy via Libya, but had no money left.

“I don’t have a family anymore,” said Ms. Conteh, who sold clothes in Sierra Leone. “I do not have anything.”

Their compatriots tried to discourage them by telling stories of sexual violence and beatings by border guards in Algeria and sexual slavery in Libya. In interviews, more than a dozen migrants said they were held in appalling conditions in Algerian prisons and then forced to walk for hours through the desert before being taken to Agadez.

Alfred Conteh, a 29-year-old truck driver from Sierra Leone (no relation to Mabinty Conteh), described how inmates in an Algerian prison were so thirsty that they stole each other’s urine bottles. Mr Conteh said he had waited months to be repatriated.

“I’m tired of this thing and I just want to go home,” he said.

But neither laws nor testimonies of atrocities discourage migrants.

“People want to leave, no matter how much you stop them,” said Demba Mballo, a Senegalese migrant who settled in Agadez and now connects migrants with drivers. “We don’t encourage, we don’t discourage. We’re just facilitating.”

Omar Hama Saley contributed to the reporting.