| Voting begins in EU election dominated by migration. Polls opened in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands today while most other countries in the bloc will vote Sunday, with results likely by Monday. Although arrivals of refugees and migrants to Europe are at their lowest level in five years, migration has been a key issue in the run up to the election. EURACTIV summarizes the range of migration policies being proposed by the six largest political groups participating in the election. UNHCR has issued seven key calls to the candidates, which include offering more legal options for refugees to reach Europe safely, supporting refugee-hosting countries outside Europe, and boosting search-and-rescue capacity in the Mediterranean. Politico reports that in Greece, an Afghan refugee who received his Greek citizenship papers just three months ago is standing as a candidate and hopes to serve as a voice for Europe’s most marginalized communities, including refugees. | |
| Asylum-seekers returned to Mexico face waits up to a year. The US Department of Homeland Security said on Monday that around 6,000 asylum-seekers had been returned to Mexico since January, when the policy requiring some asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for court hearings went into effect. US officials initially said that those returned would have to wait up to 45 days for their first court appearance, but BuzzFeed News reports that a growing number of asylum-seekers returned to Mexico are receiving court dates as late as June 2020. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, the policy poses a threat to asylum-seekers returned to border cities such as Nuevo Laredo, where shelters are already at capacity and the threat of violence and kidnapping is high. The returnees are joining thousands of asylum-seekers still waiting to register claims. With only a limited number allowed to apply each day, thousands are now waiting to cross, overwhelming services and creating what one shelter director in Tijuana described as “a humanitarian crisis”. | | |
| Air assault intensifies in Syria’s northwest. The Guardian reports that at least 11 people died in the overnight bombing on Wednesday of Maaret al-Numan in Idlib, the Syrian opposition’s last stronghold in the country. An escalated campaign of shelling and aerial bombardments displaced more than 180,000 people from southern Idlib and northern Hama in the first two weeks of May, according to UN figures. As the bombardments continue, recent estimates put the figure at more than 200,000. Many of those forced to flee had already been displaced to Idlib by fighting in other parts of the country. With nowhere else left for them to go, Reuters reports that many are camped on the Turkish border. | | |
| The undercover migrant. The BBC’s Africa Eye recounts the incredible story of a young Ghanaian man who decided to travel the treacherous migrant route through the deserts of northern Mali and Algeria in order to secretly record the abuses perpetrated against refugees and migrants by smugglers and traffickers . He barely survived his ordeal and witnessed the deaths of several fellow travellers, some from beatings at the hands of the smugglers, but he managed to record some of what he saw with a pair of glasses that could record low-resolution images. After making it back to Ghana, he shared his undercover recordings with the British High Commission, who informed law enforcement in Mali. His evidence was used to arrest several suspected people-smugglers. | | |
| Calls to reform Ireland’s emergency housing system for asylum-seekers. UNHCR’s representative in Ireland said on Wednesday that it is taking too long to process asylum claims for people in the country’s direct provision centres – a form of interim housing for asylum-seekers while they await the outcome of their asylum applications. Addressing a meeting of Ireland’s Oireachtas Justice committee, UNHCR’s Enda O’Neill expressed concern about the current average time of 15 months to process an asylum claim. The Irish Times reports that an estimated 700 to 800 people in direct provision centres who have received refugee status are unable to move on due to the lack of available housing. | | |
| Stateless in Lebanon. This film by Al Jazeera reports on the once nomadic Abu Eid tribe , whose unregistered status in Lebanon has made them vulnerable. Some 50,000 Abu Eid members now live across Lebanon, many of them in the Bekaa Valley. Some of the older generation succeeded in securing Lebanese nationality through a 1994 naturalization decree, but have been unable to pass citizenship on to their children. Effectively stateless, this younger generation of Abu Eid people cannot access free public services like education and health care, nor can they work or marry legally, own property or move freely around the country. | | |
| As a child growing up without parents in a refugee camp in Uganda, Desange Kuenihira believed taunts from people who said she would never achieve anything in life. But soon after resettling to Utah in the United States at the age of 13, she changed her mind. Now, at age 18, she has just earned not only a high school diploma but an associate’s degree. “When I say I’m a refugee, most people tend to see me as a victim,” she told the Deseret News . “I’m not a victim. I’m a warrior.” | | |
Nearly 19,000 asylum-seekers are estimated to be in Mexican border cities waiting to be admitted to the United States.
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