Thinkprogress.org
From the United States to Africa and Europe, desperate families fleeing hunger and violence are callously rejected.
Despite the best effort of Western countries to contain migrants and refugees from countries where war, rampant violence, oppression, and hunger have sent people fleeing on foot any which way, the situation continues.
Increasingly hardline policies don’t seem to be stopping the movement of people so much as resulting in situations that have resulted in migrants and refugees, already suffering trauma, being either abandoned in the middle of deserts or trapped either in Kafkaesque situations or literally, at sea.
On Monday, the Associated Press reported that Algeria has been expelling thousands of migrants and refugees — up to 13,000 — into the Sahara desert, in 118-degree heat,
The unwanted, which include pregnant women and children, are being stranded without food and water, told to find their to way Niger, on Algeria’s southeast border, with the nearest source of water being nearly 20 miles away. Survivors told the AP that “Women were lying dead… Other people got missing in the desert because they didn’t know the way.”
They spoke of giving birth to babies who had not survived and were buried in shallow graves in the middle of nowhere, of people giving up and just sitting down to die, of disoriented people wandering off, never to be seen again.
Algeria accelerated its deportations after the European Union started pressuring North African countries to stop migrants from boarding boats and heading to its shores in 2017, and around the time when it struck a deal with Libya, paying militia to detain migrants in massive camps.
Even though the policy has resulted in mass abuses in Libya (where open slave markets now exist), and deaths in Sahara, where Algeria expels migrants, sometimes at gunpoint, the E.U. maintains there is little it can do stop what the U.N. has criticized as inhuman and degrading treatment of the migrants.
Over the weekend, nearly 1,000 migrants were rescued by the Libyan coast guard and taken back to Tripoli, where they have almost zero protections.
