Terror in the Waters: European Complacency in the Shadow Immigration System

Anyone with any remote knowledge of the refugee crisis unfurling in the Mediterranean Sea remembers when the world shook with the image of the dead 4-yearold Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up on shore. The image, released in 2015, was a stark indicator of the perilous and oftentimes fatal conditions refugees faced when attempting to flee unsafe environments and enter Europe. Since then, however, even as more uncomfortable truths have been uncovered about the inhumane treatment of refugees, substantive action has not been taken against the powerful organizations that foster and intensify that treatment.

In 2021, Ian Urbina, the founder of the Outlaw Ocean Project, wrote a scathing piece in the New Yorker exposing some of the most uncomfortable truths about the refugee crisis. His work centered around the creation of the brutal shadow immigration system directly funded and supported by the European Union, one of the most well-known political and economic unions in the entire world. 55

The story he told exposed the European Union for its complacency in the mistreatment of hundreds of refugees fleeing danger in various African countries, as well as for its direct ties to the Libyan Coast Guard, which is now known for its capture, torture, and abuse of refugees.

So where does this story in the ongoing refugee crisis begin?

In 2015, over a million people fled to Europe through the Middle East and Africa. Many followed a route that took them through Libya and across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. The World Bank reports that by 2050, sub-Saharan Africa could see up to 86 million climate migrants, which indicates that the amount of migrants fleeing their countries is only set to increase more.

With the knowledge of the amount of refugees that were fleeing through Libya and the staggering number of refugees yet to come, Europe had pressured Libya for many years to help curb migration through the creation of a shadow immigration system. There were already tragedies of the most extreme degrees occurring on the Mediterranean Sea: in 2013, a boat that was carrying 500 migrants caught fire and capsized right off the coast of Italy, causing the death of over 100 people and the disappearance of 250 people. Initially, European leaders had responded with rousing cries to address the problem of immigration with concern for the people dying in their attempts to find safety. That concern did not last long, though.

The same leaders struggled to find ways to accommodate migrants with limited resources, and calls for strengthening borders and ‘cracking down’ on immigration got stronger. Xenophobia proliferated in many European countries, and such were some of the conditions that led to the creation of the shadow immigration system. The European Union created the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa in 2015 under the guise of providing aid to developing countries. The fund’s actual work focuses on curbing migration out of Africa through restrictive immigration policies. The fund’s money does not require any scrutiny from the Parliament; rather, the European Commission, which functions as the Union’s executive branch, has the authority to handle the money as it sees fit. Knowing that the European Union was already looking to curb migration and capitalizing off of the rhetoric being used against refugees, Italy’s “Minister of Fear,” Marco Minniti, took to working with Libya to stop the flow of migrants. Minniti served as Italy’s Minister of the Interior in 2016.

What came of this collaboration?

What resulted was the looping in of the Libyan Coast Guard into the shadow immigration system. While having a name that makes it look like a branch of the military, the Libyan Coast Guard actually functions out of a failed state, and it is not a centralized group.

Many humanitarian workers actually call it the ‘so-called Libyan Coast Guard.’ Now, the Libyan Coast Guard’s primary function is to patrol the waters of the Mediterranean and detain refugees.

In 2018, the Italian government worked with the European Union to help the Coast Guard gain approval from the United Nations to operate one hundred miles off the coast of Libya, which meant that the Coast Guard could operate in international waters that reached over halfway to Italy. Thousands upon thousands of dollars were shelled out to give the Coast Guard resources and training. In fact, the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, played a most pivotal role in aiding the Coast Guard and capturing migrants. Ian Urbina said that Frontex essentially operated as the ‘Air Force’ in the Libyan migration operation: “So, the air force is called Frontex, and Frontex is the EU border agency. And Frontex puts planes and drones over the Mediterranean with the sole purpose of spotting and looking for migrant rafts that are trying to reach Europe, and they report that intelligence ultimately to the Libyans.” Frontex essentially gives aerial surveillance footage of migrants in the sea to the Coast Guard so the Coast Guard can detain those migrants and then shove them into abusive detention centers and for-profit prisons.

Interestingly enough, Frontex has tried to deny its collaboration with the Libyan Coast Guard, insisting that its sole goal is to save the lives of migrants. This, of course, is quite a hypocritical goal when Frontex is actively involved in aiding a group that detains migrants in 57

The evidence of Frontex’s collaboration with the Coast Guard tells a story that contradicts the goal it claims to work towards. For instance, a nonprofit journalism organization called Lighthouse Reports produced clear documentation of 20 instances wherein Frontex was close to migrant boats that were captured by the Coast Guard. Furthermore, a European transparency group that goes by the name FragDenStaat released documents that prove that Frontex sends the exact locations of migrants' rafts directly to the Coast Guard.

The European Union is also directly tied to the prisons operating in Libya itself, where many migrants are held in hazardous conditions that threaten their health and safety. The European Union provides the funds that the prison system runs on, and many migrants are raped, tortured, unlawfully imprisoned, and killed in that system. The funds can be traced: the 2021 New Yorker article previously mentioned was the result of an 11-month investigation that unveiled purchasing documents, open-records requests, and tracking data. With mounting evidence, it can be confidently stated that the European Union helps identify migrant rafts and boats in the Mediterranean Sea, gives intelligence to the Libyan Coast Guard (which thereby enables the Coast Guard to detain and imprison the migrants), and funds the inhumane prisons that the migrants are then sent to.

The conditions that migrants are held under are so horrific that no words will be enough to fully encompass them. The story of migrant Aliou Candé, which was exposed to the world through Urbina’s work, is only one of the many stories of migrants who were killed in the prison system. Candé embarked on the journey of migration because he wanted to improve the conditions that this family faced back home and save his farm. He followed a dangerous path through parts of the Sahara and Algeria. When he landed in Morocco and learned that passage to Spain was far more expensive than attempting to get to Italy through Libya was, he decided to take his chances with Libya. He was later detained and taken to prison after attempting to cross the Mediterranean in a dinghy. Candé’s cell was so densely packed with migrants that humanitarian workers could not meet with him in it.

One night in the prison, several Sudanese migrants who had been detained tried to break out of their prison cell to escape the conditions they were being held in. The situation became quite chaotic as some detainees started fighting with each other. At some point, the guards were alerted of the ‘disturbance,’ and they came with semiautomatic rifles. Candé was shot in the neck while he was hiding in the shower. He died within minutes.

They can become the ‘guardians’ of the migrants and force them to perform private work. In 2017, CNN released footage where migrants were sold for agricultural labor in Libya. The scene can be accurately described as a modern-day slave market.

And yet, with all of the evidence that has been gathered by various individuals and organizations, and with the obvious human rights violations that are actively occurring, no substantive action has been taken against the European Union, Frontex, or the Libyan Coast Guard.

What does that say about the position the international community has taken on the worsening refugee crisis in the Mediterranean?

While migrants face horrors in the prisons, they are also subject to horrors outside of the prisons if a Libyan national comes to buy them for work. Libyan nationals are able to pick up migrants for work from the prisons with a fee. 58

Italy has continued to work directly with Libya, while the European Union has continued to fund the Libyan Coast Guard. In fact, in 2021, the European Commission committed to building a ‘new and improved maritime rescue coordination center’ for the Coast Guard. Europe has continued to solidify its stance on anti-migrant policies used in countries like Libya: regardless of the human rights violations and regardless of the alarms being sounded by multiple humanitarian organizations around the world, if Libya can help keep migrants out of the predominantly white continent, then it must be supported.

In October 2023, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that there were over 110 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and 36.4 million of those people were refugees. These people were forcibly displaced ‘as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.’ The continuing disaster of climate change only alerts the world to even more conditions that could create refugees: over 70% of the world’s refugees come from climate-vulnerable countries. Candé originally decided to migrate because climate change was severely impacting the crops on his farm. How much more evidence needs to be procured to warrant international action against the organizations and militias that directly lead to the death of refugees like Candé?

Without international intervention, European countries are sending a very clear message to the world:

“If we use violent methods that kill people to curb immigration without repercussions, then you can most certainly get away with it, too.”