For centuries universalizing narratives construed North African landscapes as a blank canvas on which colonial dynamics of human exploration and exploitation could be inscribed. Yet the ever-increasing incorporation of natural spaces in the European Union’s process of border securitization in the face of global migration has overlaid new geopolitical coordinates onto these purportedly inert spaces. Since the late 1980s, the unequal mobility regime between global North and global South has increasingly strengthened, marking out the Mediterranean and the Sahara as two border zones where the eradication of undesirable migrants can be enacted. The mushrooming of detention camps in deserts, increased drone surveillance, the interception of rescue operations at sea, and the outsourcing of border enforcement to North African states have all contributed to the illegalization of cross-border movement, with the corollary effect of bringing further precarity to the unstemmed flow of crossings. European attempts at controlling the southern border of the Union have transformed the natural spaces hemming in the Maghreb into putatively impenetrable walls (Bensaâd 2006; Abderrezak 2018), a lethal border zone aiming to deter Southern migrants’ clandestine crossings, often at the expense of their lives. This paper examines the ways in which the geophysical (the Maghreb’s natural spaces, like the sea and the desert) and the geopolitical (the imperative to stem illegal migration) collide in Europe’s biopolitical management of illegalized migration at the continent’s expanded physical borders. Whether drowning at sea or dying of exposure in the desert, the border-crossers meet an untimely death through the mediation of weaponized geophysical forces. Interconnecting Achille Mbembe’s concepts of “necropolitics” and “borderization” (Mbembe 2019) with recent theoretical work in the environmental humanities and new materialism (Grosz 2012; Grosz 2017; Povinelli 2017), I offer a new reading of Maghrebi natural spaces in light of their elemental agency—rethinking land/waterscape in terms of substance (water, sand), as a necropolitical agent performing the death of exposed migrant bodies attempting to cross. By bringing together the geophysical and the geopolitical, this paper thus proposes a reframing of the Maghrebi region in elemental terms beyond its cultural and geopolitical histories. Through its incorporation into the order of Europe’s borderization, the Maghreb integrates an expanded geophysical map connecting it to sub-Saharan Africa and Europe through its natural interfaces. This paper eventually proposes a revigorated spatial model where the region’s liminality (El Guabli 2021) is redeployed along material, planetary coordinates.