Coronavirus traps migrants in mid-route danger zone

Rohingya refugees floating in Bay of Bengal for weeks have landed on B’desh island

GUATEMALA CITY: Thousands of desperate migrants are trapped in limbo and even at risk of death without food, water or shelter in scorching deserts and at sea, as governments close off borders and ports amid the Coronavirus pandemic.

Migrants have been dropped by the truckload in the Sahara Desert or bused to Mexico's desolate border with Guatemala and beyond. They are drifting in the Mediterranean Sea after European and Libyan authorities declared their ports unsafe. And about 100 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are believed to have died in the Bay of Bengal, as country after country pushes them back out to sea.

Many governments have declared emergencies, saying a public health crisis like the Coronavirus pandemic requires extraordinary measures. However, these measures are just the

latest efforts by governments to clamp down on migrants, despite human rights laws.

“They just dumped us,” said Fanny Jacqueline Ortiz, a 37-year-old Honduran travelling with her two daughters, aged 3 and 12.

Ortiz reached the US, but American authorities expelled her to Mexico. The Mexican government in turn abandoned the family on March 26 at the

lonely El Ceibo border crossing with Guatemala. Ortiz and other migrants on the two-bus convoy were told to avoid the Guatemalan soldiers guarding the border, which was closed due to the pandemic.

“They told us to go around through the mountains, and we slept in the woods,” she recalled.

Over the next few weeks, an activist helped Ortiz and others in her group of 20 find a ride to the next border, in Honduras.

Meanwhile, at least 29 Rohingya refugees from a fishing boat floating in the Bay of Bengal for weeks have landed on an island in southern Bangladesh, officials said Sunday.

The refugees, including 15 women and six children, landed on Bhasan Char island on Saturday and are believed to be from one of several boats stuck at sea, said Tonmoy Das, local chief government official in Noakhali district.

Das said food, doctors and a team of 10 policemen were sent to the island to take care of the refugees.

An official from Bangladesh's Refugee Commissioner's office in Cox's Bazar district said the office was aware of the development. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Rights groups say hundreds of Rohingya are stranded on at least two fishing trawlers between Bangladesh and Malaysia.

The refugees reportedly attempted to illegally reach Malaysia, but failed because of strict patrols to keep out the coronavirus.

Since the aftermath of World War II, international and some national laws have protected refugees and asylum-seekers. Even if states have the right to close themselves off for national security, they cannot forcibly return migrants to countries where they will face violence and other dangers, according to Dr. Violeta Moreno-lax, professor of migration law at Queen Mary University of London.

Yet that is exactly what is happening.

“This is blatantly discriminatory and never justified,” said Moreno-lax. “The pandemic provides the perfect excuse.”

The desert deportations have been happening for years in North Africa and beyond, and Europe has been deadlocked on how to handle migration on the Mediterranean since the 2015 migration crisis. In the United States, President Donald Trump made migration a central issue of his winning 2016 campaign and has unsuccessfully promised to put an end to border crossings from Mexico ever since taking office.

But this year, Coronavirus has shifted the dynamic and allowed governments to crack down even harder, even as the desperation of those on the move remains unchanged.

In the United States, Trump is using a little-known 1944 public health law to set aside decades-old American immigration law.

For the first time since the US asylum system was created in 1980, Mexicans and Central Americans who cross the border illegally no longer even get the chance to apply for asylum.

Instead, they are whisked to the nearest border crossing and returned to Mexico within hours; asylum-seekers at official crossings are also blocked.

Nearly 10,000 Mexicans and Central Americans were “expelled” to Mexico less than three weeks after the new rules took effect March 21, according to US Customs and Border Protection.

US authorities say the decision was not about immigration but about public health.

Mexico then pushes the migrants further south. Mexico denies that it leaves migrants to fend for themselves, saying it coordinates with their home governments.

The very day Ortiz left El Ceibo, Mexico's secretary for foreign affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, told The Associated Press: “No Central American is put anywhere in southern Mexico .... We are helping them return to their countries, when their countries and the migrant accept return.”

But the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights last week cited a cascade of borders from Mexico to Panama where thousands of migrants are caught out “in improvised camps, on the streets, or in shelters that have not always implemented health protocols to protect them.”