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Migrants are leaving Libya, every day by the thousands, and already 1,750 have drowned in the spring sailing season. Migrant shipwrecks are the leading edge of a crisis, but they tell only part of the story.

A global refugee catastrophe is unfolding, and the United Nations—which sets the rules and runs the camps—is hard-pressed to meet new needs. Plus, it’s so mired in sluggish bureaucracy, without help it can’t respond to the rapidly changing situation.

Last year’s reports tell a staggering story—51.2 million people forcibly displaced around the world—an average of 32,200 persons per day forced out by conflict and persecution. The year 2013 saw the highest number on record of newly displaced persons—8.2 million—homeless but still living within their own country. Another 2.5 million became new refugees forced to leave their own country, the highest number since 1994.

All that was before ISIS moved into central Iraq last summer, displacing 2.5 million people. With ISIS onslaughts also in Libya, Nigeria, and elsewhere, we can safely assume when the UN releases its global refugee report next month, it will be another record-setting year.

The methods for giving temporary shelter are broken. It’s a problem shaping the future, considering 50 percent of all refugees are underage 18.

While the deep security and foreign policy—and dare I say religious?—issues feeding the global disorder ought to be addressed, so must refugee system reform. To the detriment of millions, the methods for giving temporary shelter are broken. It’s a problem shaping the future, considering 50 percent of all refugees are under age 18.

Without outside attention, especially from the 17 nations that regularly accept “quota refugees” from refugee camps (including the United States), the nations hosting the refugee camps, or the refugees themselves, are taking matters into their own hands.

In mid-April officials in Kenya gave the UN Refugee Agency an ultimatum: It must close Dadaab refugee camp within three months and return its residents to Somalia. Otherwise Kenya will “relocate them ourselves.”

Dadaab, at 225,000 mostly Somali refugees, is the world’s largest refugee camp. It’s been in operation since 1991 in barren scrubland of northeast Kenya. Think “Black Hawk Down,” the notorious U.S. pullout from Somalia, and a failed UN peacekeeping effort in Mogadishu. Kenya has for years been battling violence spinning out from Dadaab, and on April 2 it had enough. That’s the day al-Shabaab militants, some, Kenyan officials claim, hidden inside Dadaab, killed 148 mostly Kenyan students, all Christians, at Garissa University.

Predictably, Amnesty International and other UN-aligned organizations warn against the move. But Dadaab is like a mini-nation all its own, growing young militants along with despair and regular outbreaks of violence.

Yarmouk is another. Formed in 1957 to house Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli War, it’s one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps. Yasser Arafat and the PLO staged rocket launches on Israel from camps like Yarmouk, and were the ones who refused to allow the refugees there to be repatriated anywhere else—because if they did, what would become of the PLO’s raison d’etre over stateless Palestinians?

Flash forward to 2015 and three years of civil war in Syria. In April ISIS fighters took over much of the camp, and Yarmouk’s nightmare came into focus. A camp that housed 160,000 refugees in 2011 was down to 18,000. Why? No one knows. The camp had become a hotbed of Syrian rebel groups, and it’s likely that thousands of children and others have died there.

The UN revealed it delivered food to Yarmouk on only 131 days in 2014, and then only 89 boxes per day, when at least 400 were needed. A UN official who showed up at the camp this year (cameras and journalists in tow) brought only 60 boxes, and was overwhelmed by a throng of refugees beyond desperation (pictured above).

God is our refuge, the psalmists tell us. And if that isn’t enough to spur us to bring the refugees of the world into a place of real shelter and rest, we have instructions to shelter the homeless, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. A wide-open door of international failure yawns for the church and faith-based organizations to enter in.

Email mbelz@wng.org