The European Union Is Deliberately Leaving Migrants Abandoned at Sea
In recent years, European coastguards have illegally pushed tens of thousands of people back across the EU’s sea borders. Now, a court challenge is exposing EU border agency Frontex’s conduct — and an immigration regime that deliberately drowns people.
Two lifeguards from the NGO Open Arms help migrants off a wooden boat during a rescue mission on March 29, 2021 in the Mediterranean Sea. (Carlos Gil / Getty Images)
On a summer night in 2020, a boy of not quite eighteen slipped below the waterline in the Aegean Sea, somewhere between the western edge of Turkey and the Greek coastline.
The physical process of drowning at sea is sometimes over in under a minute, when sped up by the struggle to breathe as saltwater fills one’s lungs and cuts off the supply of oxygen. But the youth in the water did not go quietly. He had no intention of dying. He wouldn’t have come this far, across nations and continents, but for a wild hope of living. He tried to stay above water for as long as he could.
We know what happened chiefly because there was a witness. His friend Jeancy — also still a teenager at this point — was meters away, clutching the sides of a dinghy as high waves hurled it about, watching powerlessly as he went under.
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