It Could Happen Here - Migrant Detention in Libya

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

James is joined by Mick to talk about the horrific conditions migrants face in Libya and the EU’s funding of detention camps. Sources: https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean

https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/61570/libyas-coast-guard-has-intercepted-and-returned-nearly-21000-migrants-in-2024 https://apnews.com/article/italy-libya-ossama-almasri-icc-arrest-hague-305b5eed193ef7774e6591d4f0a256fc 

 European Commission Financial Transparency System
Andrea Beck, 2024 Italian and EU Funding of the Libyan Coast Guard: How Italian External Border Immigration Policies Have Created Crimes Against Humanity, Public Ignorance, and Legal Accountability Issues Ronald Bruce. Libya: From Colony to Revolution Ship of Humanity: Witness to Rescue in the Mediterranean by Judith Sunderland Capitivity, Migration and Power in Libya. Nadia Al-Dayel, Aaron Anfinson & Graeme Anfinson 2021. Tilley: War Making and State Making as organized crimeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shame and the culture that fueled its decades long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad free on I Heart True Crime Plus.

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Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars. Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool Zone Media. Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today and I'm lucky to be joined again by Mick. We're going to talk today about Libya and just like right off the top, this is going to be a sad episode. Not much good happens to migrants in Libya. A lot of bad stuff happens.

And if you, someone who prefers not to hear about like violence or sexual violence or incarceration, it's probably some other stuff I'm overlooking. This might not be the episode for you and that's fine. But Mick, how you doing? Hi James, I'm good, I'm good. That's fine. But Mick, how you doing? Hi, James. I'm Guds. I'm Guds. That was an uplifting intro, wasn't it? I thought I felt like that was a really like positive way to start the show. Yes, definitely. Definitely. But probably very warranted because it's not going to

be a fun episode. Like there's torture, there's imprisonment, there's enslavement. It's horrible. Libya is probably one of the worst countries in the world to be a migrant at the moment, if not the worst. Yeah. I mean, you have a whole industry, a whole part of their economy that is predicated on enslaving migrants, selling the people and all of the other kinds of violence that come from that. Exactly. There's I think over 20 or 30 different facilities with varying degrees of government involvement in those facilities.

It's very hard to pinpoint exactly like where does the government end and where does this human trafficking business begin? Right. Similar to like early mid Soviet Union, where there was so much organized crime happening within the government that it was also impossible to distinguish, like where one began and where the other ended. Yeah. Like which was which. Exactly.

It was under Brezhnev, I think, but don't quote me on that. Yeah. So. Yeah. So. Yeah. So give us a load on Libya. Why, first of all, it may be, I guess if people have been not listening, why are we talking about Libya? Well, on May 8th, it was reported that the Trump administration was considering

deporting migrants to this North African country, which is a new low. Yeah. Like the bar is buried and these motherfuckers just grabbed a shovel. I don't think it's possible to exaggerate just how cruel this would be if it were to happen. As I said earlier, Libya is probably the worst country in the world to be a migrant at the moment. And to illustrate that, I'm going to briefly quote from this 2022 Amnesty International article. Men, women and children returned to Libya, returned in this case, meaning that they tried to cross the Mediterranean and were picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard.

Returned to Libya face arbitrary detention, torture, cruel and inhumane detention conditions, rape and sexual violence, extortion, forced labor, and unlawful killings. Instead of addressing this human rights crisis, the Libyan government of national unity, now called the GNU, continues to facilitate further abuses and entrench impunity, as illustrated by its recent

appointment of Mohamed Al-Koha as Director of the Department for Combating Illegal Migration, which we will be referring to as the DCIM from now on. To make that entire list somehow worse, there has been extensive documentation from human rights groups that strongly suggest that the DCIM works together with non-governmental militias, making the latter responsible for at least six unofficial detention centers, although it is reasonable to assume that there might be more. So reporting out of Libya is hard to understate it. Yes. Sally Hayden has an excellent book called My Fourth Time We Drowned that like, one

of the things I like about it is it explains like her journalistic process. And it's people who are detained in places where they can't get out clubbing together to get one message out on the one phone that one person smuggled in, in parts, right, like someone had the battery, someone had the screen, whatever, and someone else had a SIM card. And that way they could get a message out. But it's everything that we hear about, we can assume that there is probably a lot more of it happening that we haven't heard about, or at least some more of it happening

that we haven't heard about. Yeah, the worst part about this is that it's knowing that it's probably worse and it's probably more extensive than we know because, yeah, as you said, Libya is a hard country to do this kind of reporting and I am assuming that it's not very safe for journalists to just go there and go talk to people. Yeah, yeah, and like at the end of the day, you're not, as I'm sure you'll explain, you're not just fucking with the Libyan government. You're fucking with the, the European union is absolutely complicit in this.

And like they ain't coming to save you. We'll get to that. How work the EU is complicit in both funding and in actions. Yeah. So let's first get this all into the proper context. We're going to dive a bit into the history of Libya because that plays a major part in how the situation is right now. So we'll start by talking about the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He took control of Libya through a military coup d'etat and ruled it from 1969 up until he faced mob justice in the Libyan civil war in 2011.

He is or was accused of human rights violations and cracking down hard on dissent and opposition. Initially it was on the list of states which sponsored terrorism. But from 2004 onwards, he slowly began to rekindle ties with a number of countries. With one of the main champions for rehabilitation being Italy, the former colonial power that had occupied Libya. So to no one's surprise, we're bringing in colonialism here. Now, James, you get three guesses as to what one of the cooperations was between Libya and Italy. Well, I could guess many things, Reg.

There's some stories about Gaddafi and Berlusconi, but we won't talk about those. Was it preventing migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea? Yes, that is true. Yeah. Something the Italians love to do. It was happening back then as well. Yeah. It's a really then as well. Yeah. It's a really weird relationship between Italy and Libya.

That's also kind of fascinating, but then we're going to get all the way off topic if we dive into that. Yeah. So somewhere between 2004 and 2005, Libya was supplied with money and equipment to help stem the flow of illegal migration coming from Africa. Gaddafi himself said in 2010 that this was to prevent the loss of European cultural identity to a new black Europa after Libya was paid 50 million euro for this purpose that same year.

Yeah, yeah, based anti-colonial. Yes. I'm sure there's a Gaddafi did nothing wrong movement that exists on some corner of Reddit that I haven't plummeted into yet, but yeah, this, this guy was a turd. I cannot find a stick long enough that I would touch that community with, to be honest, but that's also something that plays in here and that I think I can read a lot of human rights reports, you come across it, but there's also like a distinct form of racism for sub-Saharan or like Eastern African people.

Definitely. Yep. That's also going to play into this. And it's just a smorgasbord of bad stuff. Yeah. I mean, for people who perhaps grew up in the United States and thought of their own received very little education in school about African geography and politics, like this can be hard to grasp, right?

Like Africa is sometimes perceived as a country, not a continent in sort of discourse in the United States. And that's again, like it's not people's fault. Like it's in nature of our education system failing people. But yeah, if you're not familiar, right, I live here, of of course in North Africa and like great replacement style racist conspiracies absolutely exist in North Africa about people from sub-Saharan Africa, i.e. the parts of Africa that are beneath the Sahara desert, which you could find by looking at the map. But yeah, like just because this is in Africa, like racist shit is absolutely going down. Because this is in Africa, like racist shit is absolutely going down. No, I think it was highlighted a bit when the president or prime minister of Tunisia was cracking down on migration, that there was also like a very distinct racism against, against sub-Saharan Africans. Yep.

But it is, it's a global thing because race is a social construct and it's not like, like an inherent not like an inherent thing that you'll hear this a lot. You know, I've worked in Hispaniola a lot, right, the island that contains Haiti and Dominican Republic, the island which receives millions of dollars from the United States to reinforce the border between the two nations that make it up. You will hear this reference to Haitian people as black from Afro-Caribbean Dominican people, right? And this idea that like there's a racial distinction between the two, that it's a nature of race, right? It's a social construct that can be mobilized to create a power dynamic. Yeah, that's a whole other topic of discussion because identity and race are so intermingled, but also so fluid. Yeah, you could talk for hours about it, but that's not why we're here. Yeah. A warming up ties with Libya was a pragmatic approach from the EU as it lies

just on the doorstep of fortress Europe, but also marked at the start of a set fortress to start externalizing its borders into Africa, slowly working towards keeping migrants and refugees from setting foot on European soil, which would entitle them to apply for asylum. So even that step that's encoded in European law, we're trying to circumvent by just making sure that they don't cross the Mediterranean. So sometime later when the civil war began during the Arab Spring, yeah, Libyan dissidents got rid of the sexed best that was Muammar Gaddafi. So the world became a slightly better place after that. Currently there are two major factions fighting over power in Libya.

Although there are numerous other groups involved to dive into this would probably take up most of the episodes. So I will leave that aside. Yeah. The first of the major factions is the GNU, the government of national unity, led by prime minister Abdul Amit Dedeba. He controls the Northwest of Libya, including the capital Tripoli. The other faction is led by US Libyan national Khalifa Haftar, who commands the Libyan National Army,

or LNA, who express loyalty to the elected governments and are therefore often referred to as the HOR, the House of Representatives. I will try to be consistent with those acronyms, but no guarantees. Unsurprisingly Haftar was mentioned in accusations made in 23 for his militias' treatment of migrants with some reports indicating that they or he may be profiting off of the smuggling. So we pretty much got a warlord over there with an army at his disposal who's not disincentivized to not treat migrants as things for his own profit. Yeah. Right.

Another fun fact that reveals how absolutely fucked up the situation is. The capture and subsequent release of infamous warlord Osama Al-Masri by Italy. Al-Masri had outstanding warrants from the international criminal courts due to him having the Tripoli branch of detention centers backed by the Special Defense Force, both of which are accused of atrocities and war crimes during the Civil War. He was captured in Turin after a soccer match. The ICC requested he be arrested, but the Turin-based tribunal declined to approve it, after which Almasri was released back into Libya. Jesus. So, yeah. Great.

We love our ICC and then not following through on it. Yeah, right. Like the ICC does not in fact have an army that it can send after people who completely ignore it. Yeah, it's a body that doesn't have any power to really enforce decisions. I know that the current Dutch prime minister said of Benjamin Netanyahu that they could just ignore the outstanding warrant for his arrest and Netanyahu could just visit the Netherlands, which like, I don't even know what to say about that.

Yeah. I mean, this is the nature of what you're talking about in the extent, right? Like the ICC's rulings and all human rights only exist insofar as they are convenient to the powerful states in the world. It's very much a rules for the but not for me kind of attitude. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I find it extremely disheartening and I feel myself growing more cynical because of this world that I grew up in. And I'm slowly seeing that all the rules and all the great things that I was taught in school are kind of not rules, but more like guidelines. Yeah.

And that only apply to certain people. It's really heartbreaking to see like, I mean, I've heard it a lot from people, right? But especially from Burmese people, they really educated themselves in international law. When they were going out to protest at first, they talk about the R2P, like the responsibility to protect, which is, it doesn't matter, it's a concept in international law that would have allowed someone to intervene. And like, they thought, this is the international law, it's the world law, so someone's going to do it. And like, no, it, you know, over the months that they were in the streets, over the thousands of deaths that they've seen now, they've come to realize that that law isn't there to protect them, that there's

no one who's coming to save them. And that's led to them building a very unique and beautiful revolution, but at the same time it costs thousands of innocent lives. And it's heartbreaking to see their faith being misplaced in this institution that doesn't care about it. We can talk very high and mighty about all these laws and whether in war or whether about refugees. But in the end, very often they just seem worth as much as the paper they're written on. Yeah, exactly. It's okay to become cynical after that realization.

Yeah. So while the conditions for migrants were getting noticeably more horrible in the aftermath of the 2011 intervention by NATO, it was, as we said earlier, by no means the start. Exploitation of migrants was already reported by Human Rights Watch back in 2009. In a similar vein, the fact that the Libyan Coast Guard routinely picks up migrants in international waters to return them to Libya has also been documented as early as 2009. How Frontex is involved with that, we'll get to that later. These processes and dynamics were very much already in play prior to Gaddafi meeting his maker. This kidnapping of migrants, because I don't think there's a better or harsher word for it, is an explicit violation of international European and Italian law. Non-refoulement, which is the principle in these laws,

means that no refugee shall be returned or expelled to a territory against their will where their freedoms and life are threatened. From January 1st 2019 to June 30th 2020 Libya received 61.6 million euros as part of the European Union integrated border management assistance mission mandate with an explicit focus on establishing state security structures in the country. Funding is meant to help stem migration to Europe for strengthening the border management, law enforcement and criminal justice systems of Libya. Emphasis is placed on disrupting the networks that operate the smuggling and trafficking of persons. We already discussed these institutions are directly or indirectly contributing very often to the exploitation and enslavement of refugees.

So that's 61 million euros that is indirectly gone through those very systems that enslave and torture people. The many Libyan authorities often have direct links to militias or organized crime groups that engage in these practices. Authorities in the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, the Department to Combat Irregular Migration, the Libyan Coast Guard, and the Special Deterrence Force have all been implicated. It has gotten so bad that even the Ministry of Defense employs Coast Guard units that are made up of militias who profit from these human rights abuses. Yeah. It's fastical to think that you could throw some money at this problem and not just more empower these people. Yes. It's even, I think when we talked last year about this, I think,

Rose from Migrate mentioned it, but the Libyans get paid twice because first they get paid to make sure that to return these migrants back to Libya, but then they can also get paid for selling them into slavery. What do you even say to that? Yeah, I think it's genuinely unfathomable for a lot of people that in 2025, people are absolutely being captured and sold into slavery. That is occurring. Yes, I've read some UN Rights Watch accounts of people who were imprisoned for sometimes years and then made to work in one way or another for whoever ran that particular detention

center and the one that I'm thinking of right now, after six years, I think that person was able to buy himself away from the authorities. Then his boat was captured within 30 minutes. Jesus Christ. After he got off the boat, Olivia got back to a different detention center where he spent four days. And I think after that, he got another chance on a boat. And I think he was rescued by a volunteer or human rights organizations who are also

patrolling the sea north of Libya. Yeah, we've interviewed some of them. Talking of patrolling the seas, maybe this is an advert for a boat. Yes, there will be a Frontax ad right now for all the European listeners. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin,

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listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeart ReadyWeb, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it

to be. These days days I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. So we left off with just briefly mentioning how the Libyan state functions as part of this almost an organized crime syndicate that profits from the abuse of innocent people.

And this is in a way not really surprising. Back in 85 academic Charles Tilley already argued that the state as a form of social organization is pretty much indistinguishable from an organized crime group. Yeah. I'll make sure that the source is in the description below if anyone is interested. But for those who don't want to read it, in very short, they're both major organizations over which you have very little control. And if you don't pay them the taxes or protection money that they want, then people will show up to break your legs. That's the two sentence explanation of that article. Yeah, I like that.

After the principle of non-refoulement has been violated, refugees are brought to detention centers. In theory, under the supervision of the DCIM, in practice, this does not hold up. There are no official or verified numbers of how many centers there are, or how many people are even held captive there. Libyan numbers suggest somewhere between 17 to 35 facilities holding over 7,000 people. Human rights groups have questioned these numbers and argued that the number is likely between 10,000 and 20,000 people being held captive. The reality is that we simply don't know. Yeah, we don't know exactly how many facilities there are to hold these people and we don't know how many people are in them.

Human rights watchers or UN delegates often don't get the full picture even if they go there to visit and inspect the places. Yeah, there was one part of what I read where they would only be allowed during the day, but then at night is when most of the horrible stuff happens. Yeah. So still, there's very much a process of trying to not show what is being done there. People in these detention centers are held indefinitely and lack any sort of legal processes or procedures to determine their status. determine their status. In fact, according to a 2019 UN report, there is no official procedure to assess asylum status in Libya. Meaning that in the legal sense, this category is absolutely

meaningless. On top of that, there's also a lack of a process for exiting detainment. So that's an entire procedure that is just done at the whim of whoever happens to control like that particular facility. Yeah. And that could be someone who has just like seized it by arms from whoever controlled it last, right? Exactly. There's sometimes facilities are abandoned and they can become official. There's also been reports of the government raiding like unofficial centers, but then recapturing those people and put them in official centers. Great. That'll make it better.

It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking horrible. Yeah, yeah. Then it's bleak. The DCM closed down five centers that had a history of human rights violations. This act, however, had little effect on halting abuses. Reports of beatings and torture continued as some official centers closed by the DCIM quickly became unofficial sites, reopened and operated by militias. For example, the Buisa official detention center in Zawiya was ordered to close due

to reports of sexual abuse taking place. He reopened a day later and operated under a new name, managed by armed groups. The detainee explanation was seamlessly transferred from official to unofficial banners, helping empower militants and criminal actors in the region. So we're now going to take a deeper look at these centers. I found an amazing article by Nadia Aldaian, Aaron Anfinson and Graham Anfinson in the, and James, that this is real, the Journal of Human Trafficking, which is an actual academic journal that exists. Jesus.

Yeah. I mean, I guess, yeah, if that's a thing, someone has written their PhD dissertation about it, so it makes sense. I imagine this journal is just one or two articles, and for the rest, it's just pictures of Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Tate just back to back to back because, again, would be funny if it wasn't so fucking bleak. I can't imagine working as the editor of the Journal of Human Trafficking. It's the job that like you have done. It's like the Special Forces selection course

with mental health. Yeah. Like you are facing all the challenges that can be thrown at a person. Oh yeah. I'm sure there's like a psychologist like on standby at the journal just to make sure that the people running it are all right. These academics distinguish between three types of centers. Official, meaning they are run by the state in so far as that means anything, of course. Then there are the two unofficial types, which I will call semi-official and officious. Semi-official centers are those run partially by state forces in cooperation with local groups, militias or other non-state actors. Officious centers are those run entirely by non-state forces. While conditions in official centers are, air quotes, better than the latter

too, it's by no means a good place to be. None of these three categories are exempt from all the violence being done to people. All three have been named and implicated in abuses and violations. According to the authors, there are about 21 official sites, 12 semi-official and 22 officious sites, with one reportedly being run by ISIS in Nafalia back in 2015. Cool. ISIS had a stronghold in Libya back in the day. Yeah, they did.

Yeah. And the fact that ISIS might have been involved in human trafficking is the least surprising thing here. Yeah. I mean, they were trafficking people into the Islamic State, into their so-called caliphate, right? Yeah. This has progressed and now trafficking people away from it.

Yeah. This is a small victories. Of all these sites that I just mentioned, a remarkable amount is in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Sometimes these sites overlap with areas with known prostitution rings. The researchers found at least nine such networks with the majority of the sex slaves being from sub-Saharan regions and East Africa. They are mostly women, but it also happens to men. Libya has no laws or procedures to criminalize

male sex trafficking. While men are still the minority, I do think it's worth mentioning. Yeah, absolutely. That is also something that happens and most likely underreported on. Yeah, I think it's something you'd really struggle. Like the nature of masculinity and its toxicity makes it hard for people to come forward to you and say, this is happening to me. Right. Exactly.

And that process becomes even harder if there is no legal framework to stand on. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing to say. This is the... At least you can say what's happening to you is wrong. It's perceived as a crime, right? Like if that's not there, it says no, like, how can I support this person? Right? Who do you direct that person to? Like, exactly, anybody who has been trafficked and forced into sex work, like, and I've spoken to migrants for whom that has been the case,

like, there's a great deal of stigma they have to overcome, which they shouldn't have to, like, it's not none of what's happened to them is their choice. But it's very difficult for them to talk about it. And it's very unlikely for them to really be able to get any form of accountability for the people who did this to them. And that's in settings outside of Libya, like in Libya, fucking good luck. I imagine. Like, I think that's just a problem in general, not just in Libya. Yeah. It's arguably much worse in Libya, but even in countries that we're much more familiar with, this is happening and it's still very hard to obtain the accountability

from the perpetrators that in a better world would be happening. Yeah. So I am now going to quote from the article for the next batch of horrors. For women and girls, various degrees of sexual violence were commonplace. Facilities that did allow some NGO access barred visitations at night, which is when many severe abuses occurred. Detention center operators performed systemic rape on women and teenage girls on a nightly basis. Those that resisted were threatened with death. Others were killed by severe sexual assault and rape. Impregnations by detention center officials also occurred. Jesus Christ.

by detention center officials also occurred. Jesus Christ. So, yeah, I'm going to briefly cite the accounts of someone who has been for that. Afni, which is a pseudonym, an 18-year-old Somali woman told me very softly that she was gang raped by smugglers multiple times. Near the end of the two years, she spent confined in a smuggler warehouse in Kufra. Released from the warehouse and dispatched the Triple E to fend for herself when she became pregnant, Afne gave birth to a little girl, depending on handouts and help from strangers to survive. She told me that when she decided to attempt a sea crossing with her daughter,

they ended up in another nightmarish smuggler warehouse where one of the smugglers refused to find food for her baby unless Afni had sex with him. Her daughter died when she was seven months old. God. Fuck. What a fucking leak thing. Yes. The entire article that that quote was from is like rife with crimes like this.

Yeah, right. It's horrific stuff. I'll make sure that it's in the notes below. If, if you would want to read that. Yeah. And absolutely no shame if people don't want to read this because it is fucked. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to expose yourself to all this. Like you don't have to know every detail of this to care about people.

Like it's okay not to read it. Yeah. Uh, so I want to close this particular No, every detail of this to care about people. I think it's okay not to read it. Yeah So I want to close this particular century by just Brutally driving this point my point home But like women and teenage girls are being raped to death over there on a systemic level. Yeah, and I'm fucking disgusted with the fact that the EU is still sending money there that isn't directly facilitating this. Yeah. I mean, fucking Wilder gets on his high horse about like gender and quality and women's

rights and such things. And then like, unless it's the inconvenient gender equality of migrants, right? Or the rights of migrants. Yeah, I need a cigarette now. Fuck. It's the fucking worst thing that I deal with talking to people about work, as like people who have survived sexual violence, or like people who can reasonably expect to encounter it, and then making this journey because they think that it's their only option anyway.

Yeah, it's not that people who undertake this journey to a better life that they once are unaware of the risks. It's despite the risks that they're doing it. Yeah, and that's the same in the Americas, right? People understand that the, you know, I mentioned this in my Daring and Gap episode, but that very young children are subject to sexual violence, which also sometimes results in their death. Yeah. And like, they understand that, that the world is at such an exaggerated level of inequality that people are willing to take those risks because that's the way, the only way that they feel they can secure a safe future for their children. Yeah. It is a level of courage that I cannot fathom.

Yeah. Meaning that the best I can do is just acknowledge that I can fathom it. But that's also like a very bitter pill to swallow. Yeah, it is. Like I attend wars for work sometimes and the women who take on the migration, especially when it's not the men and not so big sexual violence violence say, ah, but it's probably more likely for women to experience it. The women who take on the migration journey alone or with their children, like those people's bravery, like I can't fathom being that brave.

I can't imagine how one can be that courageous, that dedicated to one's child. And we talked in our podcast recently about Primrose, who came with her daughter. And like, that's someone I'm still like, just in awe of, you know, like you don't see that kind of courage and dedication and just like, ability to push through things that are horrific with this goal in mind of reaching the United States. It continues to be something that I struggled to find words to express, obviously, but it's really something. I want to say something, but just speechless. You know who else should be speechless? Is it the products and services that support this podcast? I sure hope so. Just two minutes of silence. Yeah, hopefully this will just

be a little moment for quiet contemplation for all of you out there. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that

owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait.

Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm JR Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and I Heart Podcast.

From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John, who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son,

even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up, so what are they gonna do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband

found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family

in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeart ReadyWAP Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need

to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Yes. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. We've had a glass of water and we're going to keep doing the podcast anyway. Yes, rehydrates a bit. In terms of like explicit accounts, that was it. Yeah. So if someone had to skip over that part, that part of the episode should be done. You can start listening again.

So as of this recording, the Missing Migrants Project, who tracks migrant deaths and those who become missing, between air quotes, approximately 32,000 people are either dead or missing and presumed dead in the Mediterranean. And that I've been confirmed. The overwhelming majority of these people drowned while attempting the crossing. 2,582 of these cases were registered in 2024 last year. Roughly 70,000 people attempted a crossing, according to statistics from the European Commission. This may not appear as a lot of deaths compared to the crossings, but this figure does not take into account deaths on the journey towards the crossing. I was not able to verify how the number

of 70,000 was made up as the EU website I got it from is a collection of data from different countries and agencies who register it. What do you think is safe to assume? And let me emphasize assume here is that people captured by Italian, Maltese, Cypriots or Libyan coastal authorities is included in this number. So those are people who attempted the crossing and then are taken back to Libya, possibly undertaking the journey again. Yeah, right. Because yeah, I know you've stressed this a few times, but a number one does not mean that it's just a single person. It can be the same person who tries to cross multiple times.

Yeah, right. People will repeat crossings. I think we reach a point where the numbers are not, I'm not that every one of these people is a person, right? But like, I wouldn't be any less pissed off if it was 50,000. Like after a certain amount, it just becomes a number because, yeah, we just can't imagine how many people that is. Yeah, like we shouldn't ever have to conceive of 32,000 people drowning, right? That it's not a thing that in the fucking 21st century that we should allow to happen as a society. Like, yeah, this shit, like, you know, I've participated in meets later along the border,

I'm very familiar with death at the border, but the scale of this is unfathomable. Even to someone who's spent a decent amount of time across the migrant trails of the Americas, 2,582 deaths in a year. That's a small village. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. On a yearly basis. It's a decent sized city if you take that 32,000 number. Yeah, yeah. It's like a mid-sized music festival of people who didn't need to die.

Yes. I checked a website called Info Migrants and they estimate that the Libyan Coast Guard alone has returned, again air quotes, around 21,000 migrants caught during a crossing attempt. So the vast majority of these people end up back in the detention centers we discussed earlier. So that's around one for every three and a half people being captured. Jesus. Yeah.

Yeah. There was at some point a video making it around and it was this African woman on a boat filmed with like a mobile phone. And she was just crying and just saying like, Hey, if the Libyan coast guard shows up, I'm jumping overboard. No way am I going back there. Yeah. I've seen that.

That is one of those statements that I'll immediately believe. Yeah. Yeah. People have self-immolated in those detention centers, such as their misery and their desire for the world to see them, I guess, like I can understand why someone would just rather stop being. So the little calculation I just made that leaves us with 49,000 people making the crossing of which 2,582 died, resulting in 46,400 people entering Europe through the Libyan route.

Again these are approximations, more exact numbers, we'll never know. I tried to track money and expenditures a tiny bit to see how the EU is dealing with this. It's not one of my strong suits, how the EU is dealing with this. It's not one of my strong suits. I want to be upfront with that. I was able to find that between 2020 and 2023, the EU granted at least 105 million euro under the European integrated border management assistance mission. This is money that is directly going to Libya for assistance in managing our border. This number does not include money directly or indirectly given to Libya from individual

member states or from the budget of the EU's border agency Frontex. The latter has seen an absolute massive increase in their budgets. Yeah. From around 250 billion in 2016 to over 840 billion in 2023. God. Yeah, that's a vast increase. Yes. And what's relatively recently been happening is that rather than have their own vessels in the sea, they are using air reconnaissance in the form of drones or other airborne vehicles, spot boats for dinghies with migrants, and then they give that

information to the Libyan coast guards. I've heard this. So they can pick them up. Right. And this is where the EU is, I would say directly complicit in like the abuse that's happening in Libya. Yeah, I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Because we know what is likely to certainly going to happen to the people that are picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard.

Yeah, and if you're saying like, hey, Libyan Coast Guard, come over here and pick up these people, you know what's going to happen to those people. Like, and it's not good. And they keep doing it despite it being more than a decade of evidence at this point, abuse of migrants. Italy in particular, as the country receives a lot of migrants from Mediterranean crossings, is keen on helping Libya in terms of training, material and funding, additional agreements between the two countries shed another uncomfortable

light on the dynamic. There was first the EU Libya slash Italy Libya memorandum of understanding signed in 2017. It's so an enhanced enhancement of military insecurity related to trying to prevent migrants from making a crossing, inadvertently or inadvertently trying to make Libya their final stop and trap them there under the conditions that we just discussed. That agreement is a continuation of the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation that was signed by Libya and Italy back in 28th,

which described the cooperation in detail vis-a-vis combating illegal migration from Libya to the EU. We also have the Malta Declaration from 2017, which only strengthened UN-backed governmental organs within the EU, as well as a commitment to further assist Libya in training and providing funding and technical assistance. Those are the main purposes of those agreements, which is to prevent people from passing the prestigious gates of fortress Europe because politically we'd rather add them to the mortar with which those walls are built. Jesus.

And it is these conditions that Washington ghouls thought would be a suitable place to send migrants to who do not speak the language, know the people, have legal representation, or presumably even have the money to do anything. We've barely spoken of the civil war that is still going on there. With like fighting in the capital of Tripoli that happened like two weeks ago. We haven't spoken about any legal or law related issues that these people would invariably run into were they to be deported to Libya.

It's the umpteenth example of colonialism, militarism from states, war mongering, and the transfer of problems to another place or to another generation. Very much like climate change actions such as these will have immense direct and ripple effects that our children and grandchildren will learn the consequences of. Yeah. And the last bits I've added, because let's hope that no one is going to be sent to Libya from the States, but I can very much imagine that those people will face the same

horrors that they will have to create their own little communities just to be able to get by. Yeah. I can imagine some people might run into ISIS over there and become radicalized. We could also get like small pockets of people who just try to survive, but are still stuck there and grow resentment. There is no real way to estimate what the consequences are going to be of deporting people there other than that. Like the cruelty is happening that Washington Ghouls are aiming for.

Yeah, exactly. I think that the point is to hurt these people as much as possible at the moment. And then there isn't really much of a long-term thought process beyond that. I guess I would like to say that people were enraged at the thought of the United States sending migrants to Libya, and they should be. I'm glad that they were. But they should also be enraged at the reality of the European Union doing it every single day. Yes, way more than 12 people.

Like you should care about that too, especially if you're in Europe, like, you know, obviously, I am a person from Europe. I think there's it's easy for people to get this kind of smug social democracy kind of like, Oh, look at the Americans. They're so fucked up. They're saying things are fucked up here. They are. But the EU is doing some fucked up shit to migrants. And like, people in Europe should be in the streets about that, too. There's also abuses and human rights violations happening in the Balkans for the people who take that crossing. There's people who try to cross through Morocco to Spain who also encounter, again, not as bad as the things we just talked about, but by no means good. Yeah, stuff that shouldn't be happening. I don't even want to use words like good or bad because they tend to lose all meaning. Yeah.

Like less bad doesn't necessarily mean good. Yeah, it absolutely doesn't. It means less worse. And yeah, there are places to make that crossing that are less worse than Libya, but still. Yeah, that doesn't mean any of it is desirable. Yeah. Or like that we should accept any of it. No, no.

People should be fucking mad about all of this. And I also, I would like to go back a little bit about what you said about like the smug European social democracy. Yeah. Like that's definitely an attitude that's not uncommon among Europeans. But then again, we very often fail to look into our own backyards. Yeah. And also Europe just tends to be politically a few years behind the US, but we've also seen a rise in autocratic regimes like Viktor Orban.

Yeah. Massive example. example, Maloney in Italy is another one. But also in my own country of the Netherlands, they tried to bypass parliament in order to make an emergency law to make sure that migrants wouldn't enter the Netherlands. And as we speak, they're threatening to stop the government formation if no stricter measures against migrants are being taken. So it's these little seeds of autocracy that are almost more worrying because it's these little little steps that happen. And before you know it, things are getting worse quick. Yeah, like anyone who pays attention to the US can see that the vehicle on which fascism was delivered to us is being delivered to us. A better way of saying it is anti-migrant sentiment, right? Like that is how this country built the toolkit that is now being used. And, you know, the rest of the world should pay attention to that, I hope.

Yeah, we should see it as a warning sign, not as a manual. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Yeah, unfortunately it's being used as a manual by certain European governments. Yeah. So thank you for sharing that traumatic piece for reporting with us. That's too rough. I would say you're welcome if it wasn't so fucking grim to say that at the end of all that. Yeah.

I'm happy that I read a lot and put it together. I'm also going to have to find a puppy and cuddle the puppy for a few hours. Yeah. So yeah, that's all I have for now. Great. Yeah, that's all I got to you. Thank you very much. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture

that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad free on iHeartTrueCrimePlus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father?

Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up, they could lose their family and millions of dollars?

Yup, find out how it ends by listening to the Okay Storytime podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, the unexpected, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

This medal is for the men who went down that day. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, you'll hear about these heroes and what their stories tell us about the nature of bravery. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy. But to me, voiceover is about understanding

yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.