Coronavirus: Migrants trapped in danger zone
As countries all over the world seal their borders and ports in the face of coronavirus outbreak, a large number of migrants remain trapped in limbo and several are at the risk of death without food and water.
Migrants have already been dropped by the truckload in the Sahara or bused to Mexico’s border with Guatemala and beyond. Others are drifting in the Mediterranean after European and Libyan authorities declared their ports unsafe. And around 100 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are thought to have died in the Bay of Bengal, as country after country pushed them back out to sea.
Many governments say that a public health crisis requires extraordinary measures. However, these measures are simply the latest steps taken to clamp down on migrants.
“They just dumped us,” said Fanny Jacqueline Ortiz, a 37-year-old Honduran who was simply abandoned March 26 with her two young daughters at the lonely El Ceibo border crossing with Guatemala, expelled first by the united states and then by Mexico.
Because the aftermath of World War II, international plus some national laws have protected refugees and asylum-seekers. Nations have the right to close themselves off for national security, but cannot forcibly return migrants to danger, according to Dr. Violeta Moreno-Lax, professor of migration law at Queen Mary University of London.
Yet that is precisely what is happening.
“The pandemic supplies the perfect excuse,” said Moreno-Lax.
The desert deportations have already been happening for a long time in North Africa and beyond, and Europe has been deadlocked how to take care of migration on the Mediterranean since the 2015 migration crisis. In the United States, President Donald Trump made migration a central problem of his winning 2016 campaign.
But this season, coronavirus has shifted the dynamic and allowed governments to crack down even harder, even as the desperation of these on the move remains unchanged.
In the usa, Trump is using a little-known 1944 public health law to create aside decades-old American immigration law. Nearly 10,000 Mexicans and Central Americans were “expelled” to Mexico significantly less than three weeks after the new rules took effect March 21, according to US Customs and Border Protection. US authorities say your choice was not about immigration but about public health.
Mexico then pushes the migrants further south. Mexico denies that it leaves migrants to fend for themselves, saying it coordinates with their house governments.
Migrants have also been left stranded in similarly makeshift conditions in the Sahara Desert, after being expelled from Algeria and Libya.
Groups of dozens are walking 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to 10 miles) through the desert from a no-man’s-land called Point Zero to the dusty frontier village of Assamaka in neighboring Niger. There, new arrivals stay in makeshift quarantine for two weeks.
A lot more than 2,300 foreign migrants are stranded in Niger, unable to return home or go anywhere else, based on the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.
In Libya, the migrant detention center in Kufra expelled almost 900 women and men from April 11 to 15, taking them by truck or bus across a huge selection of miles of sand and leaving them either in a remote town in Chad or at a Sahara border post in Sudan, according to Lt. Mohamed Ali al-Fadil, the center’s director. Hundreds more came the next week.
Al-Fadil said the guts is “deporting more persons faster than previously.” He said the expulsions are an effort to shield migrants from the coronavirus.
Yet the large sets of migrants forced out are in peril not only of the coronavirus but of midday temperatures that may rise to 50 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit) this time around of year.
A huge selection of other migrants are stuck at sea in the Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal.
The Mediterranean has been unpatrolled by rescue boats for 14 days. The last two such vessels are lashed together off the coast of Italy plus a ferry holding 180 migrants rescued in April, every one of them in a 14-day waterborne quarantine.
The boats will eventually dock. But no country has agreed to ingest the migrants, who'll stay on the ferry until their fate is set. Any others who make an effort to leave Libya's squalid coastal detention centers or cramped smuggler's warehouses will face an equally uncertain future, either pushed back again to Libya or adrift at sea.
Half of a world away, a huge selection of Rohingya refugees are also stranded at sea in the Bay of Bengal. Weeks hence, they boarded at least two fishing trawlers, and so are now marooned off the coast of Bangladesh.
Fishermen spotted the boats on April 20, and the United Nations refugee agency said they could have already been at sea for weeks without enough food and water. Several 29 managed to get to an island in southern Bangladesh on Saturday. The aid group Médecins Sans Frontières said survivors on another boat that eventually managed to get to shore estimated around 100 had died waiting.
The Bangladeshi government said it cannot sustain more refugees but still keep a handle on the coronavirus crisis. Malaysia has also denied entry to many other boats, each with dozens on board.
In her tiny bamboo home in the Rohingya refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, Rahima Khatun has been sleepless since losing connection with her daughter, who visited sea with her grandchildren more than 50 days ago to become listed on her son-in-law in Malaysia.
Khatun isn't sure which boat they are on but she's found out about the stranded trawlers.
“If I had wings I'd fly and go see where they are,” Khatun said. “They aren't being allowed to enter either Bangladesh or Malaysia - just floating in the centre with no one to greatly help them out.”
