The European Commission asked Greece to begin an investigation into a New York Times report based on footage showing the country’s Coast Guard abandoning migrants in the Aegean Sea last month, a top official said on Monday, the New York Times reported.

In a statement on Twitter released the day after Greek elections, the EU home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, said her officials had written to Athens with a formal request “that this incident be fully and independently investigated,” the Guardian reported.

More than a million people have been displaced by fighting in Sudan so far, including a quarter of a million refugees, a U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) spokesperson said on Friday, Reuters reported.

“The latest figure includes some 843,000 people displaced internally and around 250,000 people who have fled across Sudan’s borders, U.N. refugee agency spokesperson Matthew Saltmarsh told a Geneva briefing,” the news agency said.

Video evidence shows asylum seekers being rounded up, taken to sea and abandoned on a raft by the Greek Coast Guard, the New York Times reports on May 19.

The Times article includes video footage provided to it by an activist who shared it with The New York Times.

Greece’s government “has consistently denied mistreating asylum seekers and points to the fact that it shoulders a disproportionate burden of managing new arrivals to Europe,” the article noted.

“But the video, provided by an Austrian aid worker, Fayad Mulla, who has spent much of the past two and a half years working on the island and trying to document abuses against migrants, may be the most damning evidence yet of the Greek authorities’ violation of international laws and E.U. rules governing how asylum seekers must be treated.”

The European Union “could see another record number of people seeking to reach its borders this year via irregular crossings, with more migrants driven by poverty and climate change rather than conflict,” the EU’s Frontex border agency said (Reuters, May 12, 2023).

Frontex reported approximately 330,000 unauthorized arrivals via all routes last year, “the highest since 2016, with the increased numbers provoking harsher anti-immigration rhetoric in EU states including Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria,” Reuters reported.

A group of Baptist churches in North Carolina are retrofitting vacant church-owned buildings for refugee housing, Yonat Shimron reports in the Washington Post.

“Organized through the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina but open to any religious congregation, a new initiative encourages churches to refurbish church-owned parsonages, office buildings, youth clubhouses or single-family homes and make them available to refugees or humanitarian parolees for a nominal fee,” Shimron noted.

In late April, the network held its first housing and hospitality summit with 210 congregational leaders, “mostly from North Carolina, to learn more about how to use vacant church properties to minister to refugees. The conference made plain twin realities: a glut of underutilized church properties and a severe shortage of affordable housing for newly arrived refugees with few means.”

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is partnering with the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance to engage the hospitality sector in helping people affected by humanitarian crises and disasters, the Alliance reported on May 2.

“With almost 100 million people who are currently forcibly displaced worldwide, the partnership will see both organizations act in close collaboration to make the world’s hospitality industry aware of how they can work with and support refugee communities,” the Alliance said. “From facilitating skills training and offering employment, to providing temporary accommodation to refugees as they resettle to the new communities they will call home, there are multiple ways in which organizations can make a difference.”

The IRC will be able to engage with the Alliance’s global network, representing over 50,000 properties and 7 million rooms globally.  The Alliance’s members include world-leading companies who will be encouraged to participate in the IRC’s programs and activities.  In locations affected by humanitarian catastrophes, the local hospitality sector will be encouraged by the Alliance to identify ways in which they can support and help raise awareness of the IRC’s emergency response and recovery work with displaced communities.

The IRC will have access to specific and beneficial Alliance tools and resources, such as its online portal for refugees.  The platform, Hospitality Unite, is backed by the Alliance and was launched last year to support Ukrainian refugees looking for hospitality work throughout Europe.

“Hundreds of vulnerable migrants were abandoned to their fates after the UK coastguard ‘effectively ignored reports of small boats in distress during the days leading up to the worst Channel disaster in 30 years when at least 27 people died,” the U.K. Observer reported.

Approximately 440 people “appear to have been left adrift after the coastguard sent no rescue vessels to 19 reported boats carrying migrants in UK waters,” according to an analysis of internal records and marine data seen by the Observer and Liberty Investigates. Experts said the failure to act appears to breach international law.

The incidents occurred across four dates in early November 2021, weeks ahead of the mass drowning when a dinghy carrying migrants capsized, the newspaper reporterd.

Italy’s Senate on April 20 approved the first comprehensive immigration package “by the hard-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, which would curb integration efforts, create new government-controlled migrant centers to house those waiting on asylum applications and more detention facilities, as well as establish harsher punishment for people smugglers,” reports Gaia Pianigiani for The New York Times. 

Under the new policies, migrants will have to stay in the centers until their asylum applications are processed, which can take up to two years in Italy, the article notes. “While they wait, they will not be able to seek independent lodging and will have a hard time beginning any organic form of integration into communities. Italy is also planning information campaigns in the migrants’ countries of origin to dissuade them from leaving, in exchange for extra visa quotas.”

Almost two dozen refugees recently graduated from a training program on April 7 by the Community Resource Project in Sacramento, California, to work in the electric vehicle industry, California’s KCRA reported.

The program is funded by a grant from the California Energy Commission.

Click here for the story.

The effects of climate change violence, political instability and economic in Latin American and the Caribbean are forcing millions of people to migrate, reports Marina Franco in a new Axios article.

Ecuador has for at least two decades drawn migrants from nearby countries, Franco notes. “Now people are leaving Ecuador as a rise in gang violence has made living in major cities like Guayaquil untenable for many.” Natural disasters “have also forced more Guatemalans, Panamanians, Dominicans and Hondurans to leave home.”

The story is part of a series in Axios Latino focused on immigration to the United States.