The German migrant taxi NGO Sea-Watch picked up 446 migrants in the Mediterranean Sea over the Christmas weekend aboard its vessel the Sea-Watch-3.
Sea-Watch announced that they picked up hundreds of migrants over the weekend in five separate operations, with 96 being rescued from “distress” on Sunday, including a heavily pregnant woman. The migrants were a variety of ages, with the youngest reportedly just two weeks old.
The pro-migrant organization’s said that it had conducted five “rescue” missions over three days.
The operation comes as dozens of migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in recent days, including at least 28 people who were found dead washed up on a beach in Libya over the weekend.
Dozens more have died in the Mediterranean near Greece in recent days as well, Germany’s national broadcaster Deutsche Welle reports.
Sea-Watch is not the only migrant taxi NGO in the Mediterranean with hundreds of migrants on board awaiting access to a port. The ship Geo Barents, operated by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), is also carrying around 560 migrants and is waiting off the coast of Catania to dock in Italy.
Landings of migrant boats in parts of Italy have also continued over the last several days, with 490 migrants landing in Calabria on Boxing Day. From the 24th to the 26th, an estimated 1,000 migrants arrived in the country illegally, according to a report from the newspaper Il Giornale.
Senator Enrico Aimi, a member of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, commented on the landings saying that “the waves of landings of illegal immigrants are not stopping.”
“The situation is unsustainable because [the government of] Italy has renounced the protection of borders and territorial sovereignty.”
The senator added that the government must start turning away illegal immigrants and come to agreements with countries on the repatriation of aliens, warning that “otherwise, it is not difficult to predict chaos, even in a short time.”