“The E.U. has created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias,” says investigative journalist Ian Urbina.  His eye-opening investigation, published this week in the New Yorker magazine tells about abuses in overly cramped cells.The horror of Al Mabani . Around 1,500 people are packed into eight cells. Tuberculosis and COVID-19 spread among detainees. There is one toilet per 100 people, meaning detainees often have to urinate in bottles or defecate in the shower. Guards march the detainees out to the courtyard twice a day  where they place communal bowls of food on the floor from which they are expected to eat. The cells have fluorescent lights that stay on all night.  Those who break the rules are put into isolation . They are tied from a ceiling beam and beaten. Women are frequently taken out of the cells to be raped by the guards, many children were born as consecuence of rapes, The New Yorker reports: In the past six years, the E.U.weary of the financial and political costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow immigration system that stops them before they reach Europe. It has equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a quasi-military organization linked to militias in the country, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian rescue operations and capturing migrants. The migrants are then detained indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by the militias. In 2017, Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Libya, backed by  the E.U,that affirmed “the determination to cooperate in identifying urgent solutions to the issue of clandestine migrants crossing Libya to reach Europe by sea.” Around half a billion dollars from the E.U.’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa has been paid to Libya for so-called migration management.