After 18 new migrant boat landings in just two days, the reception centre on the island of Lampedusa now houses 900 people, despite only having space for 250.
In 24 hours alone, some 600 migrants arrived on the island as weather conditions that made sections of the Mediterranean impassable have improved in recent days and the island saw 18 vessels, mainly small boats and rubber boats, land.
Due to the overcrowding of the reception centre, the migrants have been forced to live in cramped spaces, with some forced to live on mattresses outdoors, regardless of the weather, newspaper Il Giornale reports.
As landings increases, so do efforts to relieve the island and send migrants to the Italian mainland or to Sicily.
A total of 107 migrants left the island for the Sicilian town of Porto Empedocle on Tuesday morning and another 80 were expected to leave on another vessel in the evening.
Concerns over the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus are also an issue as more and more migrants arrive in Italy illegally.
Earlier this month, two of Italy’s largest police unions wrote to Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese on the topic of illegal migrant arrivals and claimed that in some cases it was impossible to conduct coronavirus tests on all the migrants arriving.
“The countless migrants who arrive at the reception centers, often are not even subjected to a swab due to the excessive urgency of transporting them from the place of disembarkation to the various structures,” the letter stated.
“Among other things, the riots in the aforementioned centres are now of considerable frequency, constituting opportunities for the escape of migrants, with all the problems in point of public and health safety that this entails,” the letter added.
Over the course of the summer months, thousands of migrants have arrived on Lampedusa and Sicily and over the last year, Italy’s Interior Ministry revealed that a total of 49,280 migrants had arrived between August 1st 2020 and July 31st 2021.