Migrants traveling with smugglers off the coast of Yemen were forced into the sea on Thursday, with another five people reported dead and some 50 missing – just a day after a similar episode claimed 50 lives. The International Organization for Migration said up to 180 migrants were forced off…
Some 50 Somali and Ethiopian migrants traveling by boat to Yemen were forced into the sea by a human smuggler and drowned off the coast of Shabwa on Wednesday. There were dozens of survivors, some of whom left as others quickly buried 29 of the dead in shallow graves along…
The European Union’s dicey migration deal with Turkey is causing untold misery among migrants and refugees trapped on Greek islands, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released Wednesday. The HRW organization conducted research in May and June on the island of Lesbos that “documented the deteriorating mental health…
Social media images of trapped migrants in Libya are being used to extort ransom from their family and friends, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Thursday. The United Nations Migration Agency described a video recorded by a Somali journalist and posted to Facebook on June 9 that showed some…
Libyan authorities picked up nearly 500 migrants, more than half of them from Morocco, in what they say were their territorial waters off the coast of Sabratha on Wednesday – but not without a challenge from the German NGO Sea Watch, whose own vessel tried to intervene so the migrants…
United Nations migration officials said Tuesday that migrants on the North African route hoping to cross the Mediterranean Sea are trafficked in what are essentially slave markets in lawless Libya. “Migrants who go to Libya while trying to get to Europe, have no idea of the torture archipelago that awaits…
The International Organization for Migration said Friday that 27,850 migrants and refugees entered Europe via the Mediterranean Sea through March of this year, over 80 percent arriving in Italy. The numbers show a dramatic drop from the same period last year, when there were more than 165,000 such crossings, but…
The numbers are daunting. There are more than 1,000 migrants from The Gambia stranded in Libya, according to the nation’s interior minister. “Many of them want to come home,” says Mai Ahmad Fatty. “They are victims of crime and they have no money, no food, and no proper shelter and…
At the United States Department of State, the resettlement of African refugees was a priority of the Obama administration, and there was comprehensive data and a website presence to support it. Now those pages are gone – as a normal part of the transition, they exist as an archive –…
A November update on 2016 migration statistics from the Italian Ministry of Interior finds the number of Nigerian migrants has nearly doubled on the Mediterranean crossing route since October 2015. Of the 168,542 migrants arriving in Italy – a 17 percent increase over last year – the largest number came…
A woman from Sudan, living in an Ethiopian refugee camp, explains that drought sent her family to live by the river, but they couldn’t stay there because of the fighting. A Somali farmer living in Uganda tells a similar story of drought and conflict that made it impossible to stay…
Deported migrants arriving from Yemen are swelling the population of Djibouti camps, as officials with the International Organization for Migration warn that 3,000 more may arrive in the next few days. Djibouti has become “the epicenter,” says IOM official Jeffrey Labovitz, for complicated flows of migrant crossings over the Red…