European sociocultural discourses of freedom and liberty shine within international politics and foreign interventionism in northern Africa, although the externalization agreements and sophisticated border regimes ‘defending’ European culture and its sociopolitical values do not reflect that propaganda. This study examines the understanding of those discourses among racialized, excluded and economically deprived African citizens who are currently stuck in North Africa’s border areas, emphasizing the variability of sociopolitical and cultural contexts that mold the experience of not European, White and middle-class people. These intersections provide a diversity of equations neglected in mainstream rhetoric describing migration as a problem, invasion or threat. My case study reflects on ‘individual choice’, underlining the disparity of applicability between nationalities, ethnicities, religions, genders and languages. Data collected through ethnographic methods in Morocco and the Spanish enclaves in northern Africa provide various examples of the discrepancies on how a diversity of migrants and asylum seekers experience themselves the European idea of freedom, liberty and individual choice, underlining their collective preoccupations when these individuals find themselves stuck in a transit country enduring precarity, marginalization, racism, and even destitution. My ethnographic fieldwork 2019-2024 shows some of the challenges of various people on a journey and how they deal with everyday xenophobia, while planning their lives ahead, given that individual right to freedom of choice as conceived in European rhetoric seems difficult to attain for those migrants who have very little simply because it does not constitute a fundamental right for them. Decolonial praxis is used in this presentation to underline the coloniality of migration systems and how sociopolitical discrimination faced by stranded people at border areas lead to various ways of resistance against neocolonialism and the apartheid of migration that forge their everyday.