The Refugee-Migrant Casualities

The harrowing picture of Oscar Alberto Martinez, 25, and his 24-month-old child Angie Valeria spotlighted the plight of the world's 70 million forcibly displaced people.

U.S. Border Patrol reported 283 migrant fatalities on the border in 2018. Activists say the number is higher as the many migrants who die in rugged stretches of wilderness along the 1,950-mile (3,138-km) long border are never found.

The U.N. migration agency said on Friday that at least 32,000 migrants globally, including 1,600 children, have died on dangerous journeys in search of better lives since it began compiling data on migrant deaths and disappearances in 2014.

"Children are dying in all regions of the world." said Frank Laczko, head of the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) data analysis centre. "But we've seen relatively little action taken from a humanitarian perspective to help the families who have been affected by these tragedies. Countries obviously prioritise the defence of their borders." Many countries have erected barriers to deter migrants, and the EU and the United States have pressured their neighbours to cut the numbers of people trying to make the journey.

In the mean time, Carola Rackete, the young German captain of a migrant-rescue ship,  Sea Watch, is demonized as a people smuggler and is under threat of arrest by Italian authorities. Italy's deputy prime minister and interior minister calls Rackete a pirate and an outlaw. 

Libya is a hotbed for modern-day slavery. Captured on land, intercepted at sea, cuffed and injured by militias and human traffickers, migrants are sent to detention centers and exposed to every abuse possible. 

Human traffickers and well-armed militias intercept migrants enroute, buying off government officials to sell migrant labor at prices as cheap as a few hundred dollars. The European Union (EU) has invested millions of euros in the Libyan Coast Guard in the name of “efficient border management,” fully aware that those returned can only expect indefinite servitude and abuse.

Oxfam, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and dozens other international organizations condemned the EU’s move, calling the policy “complicit.” The actions of European governments have made it extremely difficult for search and rescue organizations to continue their life-saving work, Oxfam said, calling an end to returning migrants to Libya.

“From the moment migrants step onto Libyan soil, they become vulnerable to unlawful killings, torture and other ill-treatment, arbitrary detention, unlawful deprivation of liberty and rape,” according to a report by the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). “Migrants held in the centers are systematically subjected to starvation and severe beatings, burned with hot metal objects, electrocuted and subjected to other forms of ill-treatment with the aim of extorting money from their families through a complex system of money transfers,” the UNSMIL report said. “Countless migrants and refugees lost their lives during captivity by smugglers, after being shot, tortured to death, or simply left to die from starvation or medical neglect,” the UNSMIL report added. “Across Libya, unidentified bodies of migrants and refugees bearing gunshot wounds, torture marks and burns are frequently uncovered in rubbish bins, dry river beds, farms and the desert.”

Exploited by human traffickers and traded as commodities, migrants fear for their daily survival.

“We have been abandoned here, I cannot go back and no one wants us anywhere,” an Eritrean refugee told MSF. “I don’t know where my place on earth is.” 

“We are dying,” detainees told the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “We live like animals; they beat us everyday.”